COVID-19 impact | Senior pilots at IndiGo may face up to 40% salary cut under revised pay structure

India’s largest airline IndiGo is revising the pay structure of its pilots, and - together with the earlier revisions - these steps could see the salaries getting slashed by up to 40 percent.

Many of the airline's senior pilots got a mail from the company's leave planner, asking them to choose from two options, each involving a pay cut. One includes a pay structure with 42 annual leaves and the second will have the pilots take one week off every month.

At present, all these pilots had a package that included 22 days of annual leave.

"Depending on what a pilot chooses, the cut will range from Rs 35,000 to Rs 1.3 lakh a month," said a senior executive from the industry.

The senior most of these pilots were earning about Rs 7.5 lakh a month. It is yet not known from when the new pay scale will take effect.

This is the latest in several steps that IndiGo has now taken to reduce its salary bill. Earlier, it revised the contract terms of pilots who were undergoing training, with new terms including up to a 50 percent cut in salaries and a change in rostering.

This was after the carrier had cut pays in varying degree depending on the employee group.

"Leave without pay will range from 1.5-5 days depending on the employee group. Level A employees, who form a majority of our workforce will not be impacted," CEO Ronojoy Dutta said in an email.

As per executives, the airline - despite having a cash reserve of Rs 9,500 crore as of December 2019, has taken the step as it expected to use very little of its fleet once flights resume. Operations have been grounded since March, when the national lockdown was announced to limit the COVID-19 spread.

The airline has the largest fleet for any airline in the country.

"It also has the largest crew," said an executive.