No good news for Kingfisher

Things are not that good for Kingfisher. The fact remains that more than half their planes are grounded and some are returning to leasing companies. There are murmurs that the airline has not been maintaining its planes to the extent they should. I believe this theory is bunk. I do not believe that Vijay Mallya would want a disaster born out of negligence on his hands (or his brand), but these murmurs have been getting louder and are emanating from people in the aviation community.

One individual told me that several planes are grounded simply because they are 'unfit to fly'. Landing in Chennai recently while travelling for BT, I noticed seven ATR-72 aircraft belonging to Kingfisher standing forlornly with an Airbus narrow-body (I couldn't make out whether it was a A319 or a A320) at the airport's remote stand. The sole Kingfisher employee on duty at the departure hall looked very sincere in his job, but almost resigned to his fate.

Exclusive: Two airlines trying to ensure Kingfisher collapse: Mallya

I was talking to a senior executive from a rival airline of Kingfisher the other day and he believes that Kingfisher's problems are not over. Far from it. He told me that leasing company executives are in India with plans to come and take their aircraft back. And while Airbus has not struck off any of Kingfisher or the erstwhile Kingfisher Red's over 100 aircraft on order - including 15 A330-200 and 5 A380-800 aircraft - this executive says that these planes are as good as cancelled and that Airbus has already assigned the slots to other airlines. As I explained in another story, airlines 'deal' in aircraft and while Mallya raged against this, all but two of his ATR's are leased thanks to the 'sale-leaseback' route.  (The leased aircraft include his fancy private Airbus Corporate Jet VT-VJM.)

Aircraft shopping for dummies

So what's next for Mallya? Well, as Parliament is on, the man has gone hobnobbing with the powers that be in the Finance Ministry trying to catch a break - not least because of the tax fiascos the airline has endured. The rising dollar means that several fixed costs which are paid in US dollars will get even more expensive and the fact that Indigo and SpiceJet still offer competitive prices and are increasingly attracting corporate business means that Kingfisher is not out of the muck as yet.

What can save Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher Airlines

If Kingfisher Airlines has to die because stupid commercial decisions were made, so be it; and as someone covering the civil aviation sector, I can assure you some commercial decisions that Kingfisher made were quite stupid. I once asked Mallya at a press briefing (at Hyderabad) about something and I remember he snapped at me (as he always does when someone asks him something remotely uncomfortable) and said, "I have professionals running this airline, you are not a professional aviation person." Sadly, I think he didn't have the calibre of professionals he thought he did.

Now it seems he has taken the advice that someone related to me who is a colleague of his in the Rajya Sabha and an old friend of his from his school days at La Martinere in Kolkata. That friend advised him to maintain a low-profile.  It might go against his nature to do something like that, but right now, that is possibly the best course of action.