A draft circular issued by the DGCA on June 17 had said that any pilot of a wide-body aircraft (these are used mostly for overseas flights) should have a flying experience of at least 7,000 hours, including 2,000 hours on a jet aircraft and 1,500 hours on a wide-body aircraft on international routes.

The current rule just requires the pilot to have flown around 100 hours on a wide-body aircraft as a co-pilot on any route. Since most Indian pilots do not have the experience of flying international routes, airlines would have had to employ expatriate pilots, thereby considerably inflating their salary bills. An expatriate pilot costs over 100 per cent more than his Indian counterpart.

The circular came at a time when the Indian carriers are desperately trying to reduce their salary costs by replacing their expatriate work force with an Indian one. They are expected to close the current financial year with a total loss of Rs 8,000 crore, almost double the last year's losses.

"The decision was taken after a heated meeting with the DGCA in which most airlines aggressively thumbed down the circular. One or two airlines, which would not have been impacted, supported it but were snubbed by others," said a source present in the meeting.

The meeting was held after airlines like Kingfisher and pilot unions of Air India and Jet Airways [Get Quote] wrote letters to the DGCA strongly opposing the move. In their letters, some of the airlines said that the proposed rules were not prevalent anywhere else in the world.

The circular had come as a complete shock to the carriers since, around three months back, the DGCA had directed the airlines to formulate exit policies for their expat pilots.

Kingfisher would have been the most severely impacted if this circular was to be implemented. Out of its total strength of more than 400 pilots, none is experienced to fly wide-body aircraft as of now.

The circular would have impacted Jet Airways the least, which has the largest expatriate crew in the industry. The airline has around 200 expatriate commanders