Kingfisher in deep red: Pilots quit en masse, cancels 149 flights

New Delhi: Chaos reigned at airports across India on Thursday with near bankrupt carrier Kingfisher Airlines operating only 269 flights of its allocated winter schedule of 418 daily flights on Thursday. This meant it had cancelled a shocking 149 flights or 36% of its daily allocated schedule.

Even as Kingfisher keeps spinning stories about the real reasons for these mass suspensions of services it now emerges that around 130 pilots have quit the embattled carrier in the past few weeks.

With vendors, and service providers, which are running massive dues with the airline are demanding that owner Vijay Mallya pay up it now transpires the airline has drastically reduced its schedule in a bid to reduce its daily expenses.

For the record, Mallya's carrier is still trotting out lame excuses about the cancellations, claiming this is a result of aircraft not being available because of alterations being made to its fleet of Airbus 320 aircraft.

The truth on Kingfisher's actual cancellations spilled out only after civil aviation regulator the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) directed all airlines to submit the actual number of flights they intended to operate on Thursday against their allotted winter schedule quota.

The exercise also revealed that national carrier Air India, Alliance Air, Jet Airways, JetLite and Go Air were the only carriers to have operated all their flights.