Jet Airways has temporarily suspended all flight operations. This comes close on the heels of lenders rejecting a Rs 400 crore emergency funding.
In a statement announcing the suspension of its flight operations, Jet Airways said that it was in “constant engagement with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and Ministry of Civil Aviation in this regard”.
The last flight that Jet Airways will operate before the suspension of flight operations kicks in will be its 10.20 pm flight 9W-2502 from Amritsar to Bombay.
Jet Airways had earlier applied to deregister another four Boeing 737 planes, reducing its operational fleet even further.
Earlier in the day, civil aviation minister Suresh Prabhu had called for a review of issues related to Jet Airways. Among the other things discussed were the steadily increasing fares on other airlines and flight cancellations with Jet Airways steadily reducing its operations.
With no funding coming forthwith to rescue it, Jet Airways is all set to suspend all operations temporarily from midnight on Wednesday.
Founder chairman Naresh Goyal has already withdrawn from making a bid for a stake in the company.
On Monday, in a letter to its employees, Jet Airways had said that it planned to extend its suspension of international flights till Thursday as it had not received any interim funding from lenders. In order to operate on international routes, any Indian airlines needs to have 20 planes in operations at any given time.
In the past few weeks, Jet Airways has been grounding planes as lessors have moved to de-register and take back their aircraft, even though the company’s lenders have sought expressions of interest from potential investors in the company.
Meanwhile, fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya has extended his “sympathies” to Naresh Goyal even as he questioned the Centre for bailing out the ailing Air India, saying that it being a PSU “is no excuse for discrimination”.
In a series of tweets, Mallya offered to “pay 100 per cent” of the money he owes to the banks.
In his tweets, Mallya wrote that he felt sorry for Jet Airways which was once a major competitor to Kingfisher.
“Even though Jet was a major competitor to Kingfisher at the time I feel sorry to see such a large private airline on the brink of failure when Government used 35K crores of public funds to bail out Air India. Just being a PSU is no excuse for discrimination (sic),” he tweeted.