It seems that the airline Kingfisher is foundering. Quite badly.
On Friday, Kingfisher cancelled more flights, and its shares sunk on it revealing it is almost $1.2billion in debt, and is trying to raise cash.
The founder – Vijay Mallya – insists the airline will not close, but will rationalise itself and reconfigure itself. And that could be too little too late with $1.2b on the table.
With the Indian peak travel period hitting, Kingfisher have been forced to cancel 30%-40% of flights. Which is a very worrying prospect.
Whilst on Friday, the Civil Aviation Minister Vayalar Ravi told Indian TV channels he would talk to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee about possible financial assistance to Kingfisher, the Banks are very wary of bailing out the airline considering it failed to meet the last restructuring it had last December.
What is more worrying is reports that KingFisher are failing to meet aviation fuel bills, and has had flights delayed or grounded. Additional reports indicate that lessors haven’t been paid and want their aircraft back too.
Not good times.
Kingfisher is shooting for OneWorld membership at the moment, and this is bodes ill. Lets hope that this doesn’t get any more uglier….
Awesome. So another Air India situation except with all the messing of government officials in the business (but it looks like it’s not a prerequisite). How’s Jet Airways doing these days?
From what else I was browsing… Jet isn’t 100% Healthy. I’ll do some more research later…..
Jet Airways just declared a big loss, though I havent seen the numbers to figure where it came from. But I’d imagine it leads to downgrades of more service propositions
I think it’s fair to say though that Jet Airways is in far better shape than Air India or Kingfisher.
Jet’s mini-hub at BRU is also working very well for them, especially with SN feeding them passengers and Jet feeding SN’s African network.