A day after the plan to get Jet Airways back online, experts have said it will be “very difficult and uncertain.”
The airline’s creditors on Saturday approved a multi-million dollar resolution plan under which Jet Airways would be acquired by a consortium of investors.
However, experts say that the road ahead is very long. “The path to restart operations is very difficult and uncertain,” CAPA India’s director of aviation research and advisory practice Kapil Kaul told PTI news agency.
The plan unveiled by a London-based consortium of Kalrock Capital and UAE businessman Murari Lal Jalan comes after months of talks about the future of the airline and was confirmed in a regulatory filing, which did not give details of the agreement.
The plan will now be submitted to the NCLT for final approval. If permitted by the court, the airline’s new owners would be tasked with taking off again at a time when the global aviation industry is in financial difficulty due to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic. .
Airline revenues fell 80 percent in the first six months of 2020, according to the industry, despite pruning costs exceeding 50 percent during the second quarter, compared to the prior year period.
Jet Airways, with liquidity problems, announced the temporary suspension of its services on April 17 of last year. Its last flight S2-3502 took off from Amritsar around 10:30 pm and landed at Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport at 12:22 am on April 18, 2019.
At the peak of its operations, Jet Airways had just over 120 aircraft. When operations were halted due to mounting debt problems and unpaid wages, the airline had about 16 aircraft of its own.
After Jet stopped its operations, at least 280 slots in Mumbai and 160 in Delhi were left vacant, which were then handed over to rivals. The revival plan is also based on reclaiming some of these slots.
.
