350 cabin crew quit Kingfisher last year

New Delhi: Attrition in cabin crew has been substantial at Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines over the past year, say insiders, though the company says the availability is adequate. Insiders say about 350 cabin crew left their job in the past year. The present total of the crew is 1,500. Though 150 recruits in this period are being trained, the shortage is estimated at 200 air hostesses. “Our cabin crew members are fatigued and overstressed,” said an airline executive, who blamed “bad human resource policies” for so many cabin crew having quit.
Kingfisher’s rival, Jet Airways, lost a little over 100 cabin crew members in the past year.
However, a Kingfisher spokesperson denied a problem, while not commenting on the reported turnover figure. “There is no shortage on cabin crew, as during the downturn we redeployed excess cabin crew in our airport ground services for a short while, thereby increasing our service delivery on ground. Currently, post crew turnover, which is in line with industry standards, the excess number has only balanced off,” said an e-mail response.
The executive quoted earlier: “The senior ones have left our airline and we are trying to replace them by trainees, which will badly increase the strength of our untrained cabin crew. These untrained staff will not be able to act the way they are supposed to during emergencies.”
To which, the spokesperson’s response is that around 150 of the new recruits were under training and a lot of experienced crew from other airlines, both domestic and international, had joined since Kingfisher was the ‘employer of choice’ for cabin crew.
25/12/10 Mihir Mishra/Business Standard