By IANS,
New Delhi : Jet Airways pilots will skip work for the second day Wednesday as the airlines’ management has failed to bring back the agitating employees at work.
The airlines cancelled at least 35 flights across the country scheduled for Wednesday, an official said.
Expressing anguish and concern airlines chairman Naresh Goyal told a TV channel Tuesday night that the pilots have held the airline and the country to ransom.
“They have misled us. They had told us Monday that they would not go on strike. These pilots were on roster but they had called in sick at the last moment.
“We had sent doctors to their homes but some of them did not allow doctors to enter their houses. We would take action as per the company rules,” Goyal said.
Meanwhile, taking a tough stand, Jet Airways Tuesday sacked three more pilots.
Earlier in the day, the government had asked the airline to sort out the issue, as 400 of its pilots went on mass “sick leave”, so that passengers were not put to inconvenience.
The mass sick leave was to push for reinstatement of two pilots sacked earlier by the airline.
The move by the pilots led to cancellation of nearly 200 flights and chaos at airports. Over 20,000 passengers, including hundreds of foreign visitors, were stranded.
Flights out of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Chennai were in a shambles as a result of the strike.
In a reprieve to the airlines, the Bombay High Court passed an order barring any form of strike by the pilots.
Jet Airways had petitioned the court Tuesday to restrain the National Aviators’ Guild (NAG) – a union of 400 Jet Airways pilots – from resorting to any form of strike. Jet Airways has 1,080 pilots on its rolls. It operates 380 flights to 63 destinations in India and overseas, of which 113 domestic and 16 international flights were cancelled Tuesday.
Civil Aviation Secretary M. Madhavan Nambiar told reporters that the government “could only facilitate the issue”, but “it has to be sorted out between the airline management and the agitating pilots”.