Air India flight operations back to normal

New Delhi, Sep 6 (PTI) National carrier Air India’sflight operations was back to normal today after the airline’schief Ashwani Lohani "assured" the narrow-body pilots ofaddressing all their pending issues, including pay parity, bynext month during a meeting with them here this evening. In the last two days, Air India’s domestic flightservices were partially affected after a section of ICPAmembers decided not to report for duty in protest againstpending issues related to salary and allowances, besidesalleged denial of weekly-offs. Following this, Lohani had yesterday warned of "exemplarydisciplinary action" against employees "sabotaging" theprogress of the national carrier. The airline managementeven sacked one contractual pilot for "not reporting" for dutyand issued show-cause notice to five other pilots. "The CMD during the meeting assured us of addressing allour pending issues including removing anomalies in the paystructure by next month and duly providing mandatory weeklyoffs in printed schedules. So we have also decided to fullycooperate with him," Indian Commercial Pilots Association(ICPA) General Secretary T Praveen Keerthi told PTI after themeeting. "By October, we expect all our issues to be resolved,"he added. ICPA represents around 750 pilots of the narrow-bodyplanes fleet in Air India, most of whom are from the erstwhileIndian Airlines. The pilots’ body had yesterday warned of the situationturning worse If there was no "definite time-bound assurance"on resolving the issues by today. In a stern message to employees, Lohani had said suchacts (of disrupting flight services) were "just notacceptable" and shall not be tolerated under anycircumstances. "Recently, there have been delays/cancellations offlights due to indiscipline by a small section of pilots. Suchacts, not only result in revenue loss but also causeinconvenience to passengers, he added. PTI IAS RAMRG