CONCLUSION AND ANALYSIS

 Squandered Hundreds of Crores on renaming “Indian Airlines” to ‘Indian’. Any

layman can understand that such renaming doesn’t change anything. People still
used to call it Indian Airlines. Uniforms, logo were changed unnecessarily.
Needless to say, that Praful Patel & his party made lion chunk of this useless
drainage of money by Air India.

 In 2007, Indian Airlines & Air India got merged. This is a case which also tells
us that why the two mergers shouldn’t happen. IA was Company operating
within India with Indian norms (6 days a week, Indian salary structure, no big
allowance/bonus). AI was competing globally with global norms (5 days week,
Big bonus/allowances, structure). This merger led to huge infighting between
AI & IA employees unions, everyone wanted to get the better from others, but
not lose their privileges. Services suffered big time during this merger.

 The combined losses for Air India and Indian Airlines in 2006–07 were ₹7.7
billion (US$110 million) and after the merger, it went up to ₹72 billion
(US$1.0 billion) by March 2009. In two years, loss increased by 1000% Why
because special chartered AI planes used to fly just to ferry NCP leaders
(Sharad Pawar, Praful Patel, Supriya Sule etc). Often scheduled flights used to
get cancelled for flying these VIPs due to Praful Patel. Airlines had to incur
huge losses in refund, staying arrangement, rescheduling for passengers.

 Praful Patel increased order for Boeing 787 Dreamliner from 26 to 68 (50
passenger and 18 VVIP). Dreamliner that time was new to market, expensive
and without proven record. In fact, Boeing was having huge financial
difficulties with Dreamliner Series. Still Praful Patel Inflated orders without any
plan of how to use these planes. All pundits commented that it looks like India
is trying to resuscitate Boeing instead of AI. Soon Dreamliner got into Lithium
battery fire issue. All AI Dreamliner planes got grounded for months. This was
the biggest financial burden on AI, because AI took huge loans and subsidy for
this Boeing deal.

 The one decision which killed AI revenues was to remove AI flights from

profitable routes like (Middle East, USA etc). It is well known fact that Praful
Patel gave directions to remove AI from profit making routes in lieu of cuts
from Middle East Airlines (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar) so that those airlines can
capture ever increasing Overseas Indian travellers. today more than 80%
westward Indian travellers’ transit via Middle east.
  One-sided deals with UAE for Bilateral flying rights:

Now when you look at above table, total weekly seats available between India & UAE
is highest approx. 1,50,000 (One and Half Lakhs). If you contrast the 2nd highest
weekly seats is just 24,000. with Singapore. Someone may argue that there is demand
so there is so much seating agreement. The hidden point is that before Patel did this
agreement, it was limited at 10,000. So how come suddenly 15 folds increase. Answer
is that all those passengers going to UAE are mostly transiting there before actual
destination to Europe, NA, Africa. had this bilateral agreement limited and AI not
removed their planes from those routes, passengers would have been using AI or other
airlines going directly to their destinations saving plenty of Dollars & Forex for India.