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Even before the Directorate General of Civil Aviation could approve its acquisition of Air Sahara, Jet Airways has appointed its people to key positions in the Lucknow-headquartered airline.
The movement of personnel has been facilitated by a consultancy agreement signed by the two carriers, which covers all the key functions of Air Sahara.
Jet Airways vice-president, marketing, Gaurang Shetty will assume charge of team leader in the operations of integrating Air Sahara with Jet Airways. The DGCA approval is expected shortly.
Following the acquisition of Air Sahara by Jet for $500 million, the two airlines had extended the validity of the share purchase agreement by 90 days effective March 24 owing to delay in regulatory approvals.
The Jet team led by Shetty will also assist in improving customer service and the interests of domestic and international operations.
Apart from Shetty, Jet senior executives N Hariharan, Capt K Mohan, Mike Johnson, Arindam Banerjee, K Balakrishnan, Col Subir Ahluwalia, Ragini Chopra, Shivani Karki, Gobin Jindal and Rajiv Malhotra have been assigned the responsibility of providing consultancy services to Air Sahara in the areas of HRD, flight operations, maintenance, cargo, finance, marketing, catering, in flight service, purchase and airport service, respectively.
Dale Moss, who recently joined Jet Airways as its chief operations officer, has also been assigned the responsibility of guiding and leading the consultancy team, while Thomas Kuhn, who is currently heading the Berlin operations of Lufthansa Technik, will take over as the head of engineering and maintenance of Sahara Airlines.
Meanwhile, Poh Leong Choo, former senior manager, cabin crew of Singapore Airlines will take over as the head of customer services and inflight services departments of Sahara Airlines.
The consultancy support will be provided by Jet with the objective of enhancing Sahara's product, improve its on-time performance and service levels as well as its bottom line.