'AI Express is a very viable airline' Nov 5, 2010, 12.

00am IST This is probably the worst air pocket he has ever faced. Captain Pawan Arora , the new COO of Air India Express, has had questions raised about his salary and integrity ever since he was offered the job. A former air force pilot who later worked in Jet Airways, Paramount, Kingfisher and Indigo, Arora spoke to Shobha John : Your annual salary package of about Rs 1.2 crore has raised the hackles of many, especially at a time when AI is in a financial crunch. Are the complaints justified? No. When i left Indigo to apply for this post, my package was much more. I am 53. As a pilot i can serve till 65, so i have another 12 years of service. I am on a three-year contract at AI Express with six months probation. So this is an uncertain job. But i came here for the challenge of turning around an airline. And AI Express, despite the Mangalore crash, is a very viable airline. There are allegations you were removed as flight operations inspector (FOI) in the Directorate General of Civil Aviation. These are made by people with vested interests. I had applied to the DGCA to be relieved of my FOI duties on August 24, 2010, due to a personal crisis. It relieved me on September 13, 2010. If my services were terminated, wouldn't i have been relieved immediately? Even after that, i was signing DGCA papers related to low visibility take-off, etc, without the FOI designation. I have all the relevant papers to validate my professional standing. AI Express has seen an exodus of cabin crew. How do you plan to stem this tide? Cabin crew salaries here are among the lowest in the market. I plan to go to the AI board and hope that in stages, financial relief will be provided to them. Flying modules for pilots too have been reduced from six months to eight weeks so that they can be inducted faster. We have recruited 40-45 first officers. The subsidiaries of most airlines get a step-motherly treatment. How will you combat this attitude and rebrand your airline? Though AI and AI Express have separate air operating permits, it's a fact that we are under the shadow of AI. But we'll soon start an AI Express executive cadre so we can function with some autonomy. We need to empower people. We will shift base from Mumbai to Kerala. While engineering, hangers and stores will be based in Thiruvananthapuram, operations and commercial will be in Kochi. We will also start domestic operations from metros to Tier II and III cities; many will be non-traditional routes. This way, my planes will get utilised much more and additional revenues generated. The name could be changed to Express India once ratified by the board. Cabin crew uniforms too are in for a change. However, the distinctive designs on the tail of the planes will remain as they have good brand recall. There are plans to have eight business class seats and 168 economy ones. Surely this goes against the lowcost model. Not really. These eight seats would cater to businessmen and executives who don't want to travel with our regular passengers, who are mostly labour working in the Gulf. There is a market for this configuration of seats.