It’s been a few days since I’ve written about the flying mess that is Kingfisher Airlines, and things don’t seem to be improving for the airline
It is appealing for its pilots to turn up to work, whilst trying to get tax authorities to unfreeze it’s accounts
Accounts were frozen again on the 29 February when it failed to make outstanding payments.
In regards to the tax payments Prakash Mirpurisaid says:
“We are trying our best to cooperate with the tax authorities and get our accounts unfrozen at the earliest so that normalcy could be restored, employee salaries paid and further aircraft recoveries started,”
Chief Executive, Sanjay Aggarwal has also met with a group of pilots to appeal to them not to stay away from flying duties and at no time was there any suggestion that Kingfisher Airlines would shut down according to the official version of events.
Indian media report a different version with Sanjay Aggarwal meeting with the pilots on 1 March and could not commit on when the salaries will be paid, and even threatened a shutdown when the pilots said they may not fly unless they are paid.
About a 1/3rd of Kingfishers fleet of 68 aircraft have been grounded which has been varied from the bird strike excuse to not actually making operational payments on the birds.
The cash-strapped carrier has grounded about a third of its fleet of 68 aircraft. It earlier said bird strikes rendered the aircraft out of service, but later changed stance, saying that their frozen bank accounts meant they were unable to make any operational payments.
Kingfisher state that services are operating as normal.
And this is just getting out of hand now. Already there are service drops and the hope of them joining OneWorld has gone down the pan (and in my opinion, unless they got a complete reboot, it would be unlikely they would get the invite back). Similarly, hoping for a knight in shining armour to invest 49% of the ownership of the airline whilst is a lovely hope will require government support to actually allow the investment and find an airline that was desperate enough to help it out – and make one hell of a gamble to sort it.
Honestly, I can’t see them surviving for much longer…