Air India appoints Jayaraj Shanmugam as global airport operations head

Air India, on Monday, announced the appointment of Jayaraj Shanmugam as Head of Global Airport Operations. Shanmugam will assume his role on April 15, and report to Chief Operations Officer Capt Klaus Goersch. 

Before this, Shanmugam was the Chief Operating Officer of the Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL). Under his tenure, the new Terminal 2 of BIAL was operationalised. 

Shanmugam is an industry veteran with a career spanning 25 years across airline, airport, and telecom industries. He had earlier worked with Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways, and Jet Airways.

Capt. Goersch, announcing Shanmugam’s appointment, said, “Jayaraj has distinctive expertise in  driving excellence in customer experience and airport operations, redesigning and improving  services. We look forward to significantly enhancing our airport operations with his leadership and achieving many milestones in our Vihaan.AI transformation journey.”

Shanmugam’s appointment comes after the Tata Group-owned carrier laid off more than 180 non-flying employees. A company spokesperson said that employees in the non-flying functions were assigned roles on the basis of organisational needs and individual merit. “A comprehensive process has been followed to assess the suitability of all employees over the past 18 months. During this phase, there have also been multiple Voluntary Retirement Schemes and reskilling opportunities offered to employees,” the spokesperson had told PTI.

The spokesperson said that 1 per cent of the employee base who were unable to utilise the VRS or re-skilling opportunities had to be laid off.

Founded by JRD Tata, Air India’s first flight was on October 15, 1932. It has since built a tight network of flights domestically as well as for overseas destinations including in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Gulf, Asia and Australia. Air India was welcomed back to the Tata fold in January 2022 after being run as a government-owned enterprise for 69 years.