A continuation of the highest standard by the FAA will be a relief for Indian airlines especially the Tata group which intends to increase Air India flights on India-US routes. US aviation watchdog Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has completed the audit of India's aviation regulator DGCA. Sources said that the FAA team was satisfied with the work and changes in regulations by India and is likely to maintain a Category 1 status rating under its International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) programme.
A pilots' union of Air India on Wednesday sought the response of the airline management on various issues, including alleged violation of the roster system and career progression policy. The Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA) also said that if there is no response in three days, it will be constrained to seek appropriate remedies in accordance with applicable law. In its letter on Wednesday, the grouping said, "we understand the management of Air India is contemplating certain changes to the conditions of service of the pilots".
Dr Anahita Pandole and her husband Darius, who injured in the car accident that killed former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry, were on Monday shifted by road to Mumbai from a hospital in neighbouring Vapi town of Gujarat, an official said.
The new owners of Air India will have to retain all the employees of the national carrier for at least one year post which they can offer a VRS. The gratuity, pension fund and post retirement medical benefits of existing and past employees too would be honoured by the new owner, civil aviation secretary Rajiv Bansal said. Tata Sons has emerged as the winning bidder for Air India with the government accepting its Rs 18,000 crore offer to acquire 100 per cent of the debt-laden state-run carrier.
Air India will purchase 220 planes from Boeing for $34 billion, with an option to buy 70 more aircraft that could take the total transaction value to $45.9 billion, a deal that US President Joe Biden described as a "historic agreement". While announcing the Boeing-Air India deal on Tuesday, Biden also asserted that together with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he was looking forward to deepen the ties between India and the US. As per an announcement from the White House, Boeing and Air India have reached an agreement under which the airline will purchase 190 B737 MAX, 20 B787, and 10 B777X for a total of 220 firm order valued at $34 billion at list price.
With better utilisation of slots, foreign flying rights, and greater international connections, the operator of India's largest airport feels a privatised Air India will bring commercial benefit to Delhi airport and help it revive quicker from the pandemic shock. Delhi is the largest hub for Air India, with most of its long-haul flights to the US and Europe being operated from here. The airport plans to give its most modern terminal 3 (T3) exclusively to the Tata Group.
The Tata group has begun its second innings with Air India from a war zone. Being first up in Operation Ganga to evacuate Indian nationals from Ukraine, the salt-to-software conglomerate has faced a real war. But the fire-fighting that the group experienced in appointing a chief executive officer (CEO) for the airline that it acquired from the government in a Rs 18,000-crore deal recently may have felt no less.
Air India said on Monday that it has processed passengers refunds of more than Rs 150 crore during the first few months after its privatisation. After winning the bid for Air India on October 8 last year, the Tata Group took charge of the airline on January 27. Since then, the airline has been taking multiple steps to address the legacy issues such as stuck refunds.
In its first move to significantly expand the fleet after the Tatas took over, Air India has leased 25 Airbus narrow-body aircraft and five Boeing wide-body planes. These will enter service starting December, the company said on Monday. A wide-body plane has a bigger fuel tank, allowing it to travel longer distances such as India-US routes.
Ratan Tata on Friday welcomed the government accepting Tata Sons' bid of Rs 18,000 crore for the takeover of Air India, saying the airline provides a very strong market opportunity to the group even through it will take considerable effort to rebuild the debt-laden carrier. "Welcome Back, Air India," he said. "The Tata Group winning the bid for Air India is great news," he said in a statement.
Virtually addressing employees of Air India across the globe, he said for the airline to be the best again there will be an organisational redesign, and it will "require a huge transformation, probably the largest transformation and the change all of you would ever go through". The carrier will expand its "outreach both domestically and internationally" and it has the desire to connect India with every part of the globe, he added.
India Inc is gearing up for a slugfest this year and from tech to paints, new battlegrounds are emerging, observes Indrajit Gupta, co-founder, Founding Fuel.
Infosys has emerged as the fastest growing IT services brand following 52 per cent brand value growth since last year and 80 per cent since 2020 to $12.8 billion, earning it third spot, the brand valuation consultancy said in its latest Global 500 IT Services Ranking report. TCS and Infosys have pushed IBM to fourth spot from second. IBM's brand value now stands at $10.6 billion, a decline of 34 per cent from last year and 50 per cent since 2020.
Union Minister of Commerce and Textiles Piyush Goyal has stirred up a hornet's nest by taking on India Inc, specifically the Tata group, which is among the companies that lobbied against the Modi government's pro-consumer draft e-commerce policies. While Goyal's comments, made at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) event, were streamed live on YouTube, the industry lobbying body later edited the video and subsequently withdrew the entire speech. Goyal had said the Tata group and other Indian companies often lobbied for their interest, while ignoring national interest.
A pilots' grouping of Tata group-owned Air India has approached the labour department to initiate conciliation proceedings with the airline's management to sort out various issues, including concerns over possible changes in service conditions of its members. The Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA), which claims to represent around 900 pilots flying narrow-body planes of Air India, has written to the Chief Labour Commissioner (CLC) as well as Deputy CLC and Assistant Labour Commissioner in New Delhi earlier this week. Apart from service condition issues, the association has flagged that the airline's plans to hire captains for its A320 fleet on a fixed-term contract may result in an anomalous situation for the existing pilots at Air India.
Around 1,000 passenger complaints have been received against Air India during the last three months related to various issues, including refund of fares, overbooking of flights, and staff behaviour, Minister of State for Civil Aviation V K Singh said on Monday. The Tata Group on January 27 took control of Air India after winning the bid for the airline on October 8 last year. "Ministry of Civil Aviation has been receiving grievances related to air transport, including Air India, on the various issues such as refund of fares, flight issues, staff behaviour, baggage issues, overbooking of flights, etc," Singh said in his written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha.
In a multi-year first, the country's largest software exporter TCS on Monday reported a marginal decline in its overall employees for the December 2022 quarter but announced that it will be hiring over 1.25 lakh staff in FY24. The software firm posted a decline of 2,197 people in its employee base for the October-December period to 6.13 lakh. The Tata group company, however, made it clear that this was due to the higher hiring done over the last 18 months, and not driven by the demand environment.
This incident was also not reported to the DGCA, for which the regulator pulled up the full-service carrier, stating its conduct was unprofessional and issued show cause notices to the airline, its director of flight safety and the crew that operated the New York-Delhi flight, asking them to explain within two weeks why action should not be taken against them.
The aggrieved lady had "rescinded" an initial request for action after the two "appeared" to have sorted out the issue.
Two pilot unions at Air India have claimed that there is a shortage of pilots to operate the airline's long-haul and ultra-long haul flights. The concerns raised by the Indian Pilots Guild (IPG) and Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) also come against the backdrop of the Tatas-owned airline recently cancelling and rescheduling certain flights to and from the North American region due to crew shortage. In a joint letter written to Air India's chief human resources officer Suresh Dutt Tripathi on December 13, the unions said, "...we cannot maintain the printed planned roster due to a shortage of pilots, as CMS (crew management system) does not have standby pilots."
Tata Group-owned Air India on Wednesday announced the launch of new flights connecting Mumbai with New York, Paris and Frankfurt, starting February next year. Besides, the full-service carrier also announced the resumption of non-stop flights connecting Delhi with Copenhagen, Milan and Vienna. The Mumbai-New York (JFK International Airport) daily service will commence from February 14 next year, Air India said.
The Tata group's tryst with mobile services, with either CDMA or GSM technology, did not really fly, forcing it to close operations and write off losses. Now the group is back in the big game, this time straddling the telecom equipment, network and technology space in India as well as the global market. To this end, it is leveraging the opportunities that flow from 5G technology through open radio access network, or O-RAN. Recently, the Tata Sons' subsidiary Panatone Finvest acquired 43.3 per cent in Bengaluru-based telecom equipment manufacturer Tejas Network for Rs 1,850 crore and announced it would buy another 26 per cent of the voting capital through an open offer.
Tata Sons shareholders have approved a resolution to have separate chairpersons for the company and its largest shareholder -- Tata Trusts. An amendment to the articles of association (AoA) of Tata Sons, which sought to prevent a single person heading Tata Sons as well as Tata Trusts simultaneously, was passed at the company's annual general meeting (AGM) held on Tuesday. With the special resolution being passed with requisite majority of 75 per cent at the AGM, it will now be legally binding for Tata Sons and Tata Trusts to have separate chairpersons.
An A320neo plane of Tata Group-run Air India returned to the Mumbai airport just 27 minutes after takeoff as one of its engines shut down midair due to a technical issue, sources said on Friday.
Reliance Industries, the Tata group, Bharti Airtel and Aditya Birla are among Indian conglomerates that have hedged their revenue and costs linked to the US dollar, giving them financial cover as the rupee fell past 80 against the greenback on Tuesday.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel and IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have joined hands to build a 5G-based remote working technology using robotics, according to a joint statement. TCS during the trials has successfully tested two use cases of its Neural Manufacturing solutions on Airtel's 5G testbed in Manesar - remote robotics operations, and vision-based quality inspection, the statement claimed. "The 5G ecosystem will open limitless possibilities for enterprises to enhance productivity and serve their customers even better with digitally enabled applications.
Air India is set to increase capacity on domestic and international routes over the next few months as it overhauls its grounded aircraft. Air India has the approval to operate 2,456 flights per week in the summer schedule. This is more than a 16 per cent increase over 2020. But its international schedule has declined 41 per cent (compared to winter 2019) to 361 weekly departures.
Wadia Group-owned Go First Airways' (Go First) insolvency plea could trigger a 'momentum rally' in shares of rival airlines, Interglobe Aviation (parent company of IndiGo) and SpiceJet, as they look to gain bankrupt airline's market share, said analysts. On the bourses, shares of InterGlobe Aviation hit a 52-week high of Rs 2,235.95, surging 8 per cent on the BSE in Wednesday's intra-day trade, before settling 4.5 per cent higher at Rs 2,164 apiece. Those of SpiceJet and Jet Airways, meanwhile, rallied up to 6 per cent in the intra-day trade, and ended 1 per cent and 5 per cent higher, respectively, following the development, which was announced post market hours on Tuesday.
After more than two decades and three attempts, the government has finally sold its flagship national carrier Air India, and it is deja vu for Maharaja as it returned home to its founding father the Tata group. Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy (JRD) Tata founded the airline in 1932 and named it Tata Airlines. In 1946, the aviation division of Tata Sons was listed as Air India, and in 1948, the Air India International was launched with flights to Europe. The international service was among the first public-private partnerships in India, with the government holding 49 per cent, the Tatas keeping 25 per cent and the public owning the rest. In 1953, Air India was nationalised and for the next over four decades it remained the prized possession for India controlling the majority of the domestic airspace.
India's aviation industry could return to profitability in 2023-24 for the first time since the pandemic. The industry may pare aggregated net loss by 75-80 per cent year-on-year (YoY) to between Rs 3,500 crore and Rs 4,500 crore in 2022-23 (FY23), compared with Rs 17,500 crore of net losses in 2021-22 (FY22). A combination of recovery in passenger volumes and easing cost pressures due to stable fuel and foreign exchange (forex) costs could spark a turnaround. CRISIL says domestic and international passenger traffic recovered to 90 per cent and 98 per cent, respectively, of pre-pandemic traffic (2019-20, or FY20), in April-December 2022, compared with April-December 2019.
Business conglomerate Adani Group's chairman Gautam Adani is now the world's second-richest person after overtaking Louis Vuitton's Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List. At the time of writing this report, Gautam Adani's net worth was $153.9 billion, compared to Arnault's net worth of $153.7 billion. Adani is now just behind business magnate Elon Musk, according to Forbes' data.
N Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, has been appointed as the chairman of Air India by the airline's board, aviation industry sources said on Monday.
Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of the Tata Group, on Sunday said ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala will always be remembered for his acute understanding of the markets as well as for his jovial personality, kindness, and foresightedness. Jhunjhunwala, often referred to as 'India's Warren Buffett', passed away here Sunday morning due to a cardiac arrest. He was 62. Jhunjhunwala had investments in more than three dozen companies, the most valuable being watch and jewellery maker Titan, part of the Tata conglomerate.
Apple is hoping to assemble in India 25 per cent of all iPhones produced globally to reduce its heavy dependence on China.
'It's an open secret that the UK business is structurally not in a great place.'
The flight, carrying 216 passengers and 16 crew, landed safely, the Tata Group-owned private carrier said in a statement Tuesday evening.
The EV industry is at an inflection point and batteries will play a critical role ahead -- batteries and related components typically constitute 35-45 per cent of an EV's costs.
Bharti Airtel and Tata Group on Monday announced a strategic partnership for implementing 5G network solutions for India. Tata Group has developed "O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network) based Radio and NSA/SA (Non-Standalone/standalone) Core and has integrated a totally indigenous telecom stack, leveraging the Group capabilities and that of its partners", according to a joint statement. This will be available for commercial development starting January 2022.
This is not the first time Reliance has eyed a stake in the club.
Air India will require more than 6,500 pilots to operate 470 aircraft that are to be supplied by Airbus and Boeing in the coming years, according to industry sources. Seeking to expand fleet as well as operations, the airline has placed orders for acquiring a total of 840 aircraft that includes an option to buy 370 planes. This is one of the largest aircraft order by any airline. Currently, Air India has around 1,600 pilots to operate its 113 aircraft fleet and in recent times, there have been instances of ultra-long haul flights getting cancelled or delayed due to shortage of crew.
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