'Humiliated' Chennai engineers join stir, no aircraft will be released

The Kingfisher Airlines stir gathered strength after the airline’s Chennai engineers joined their striking Mumbai and Delhi counterparts, saying they were “humiliated” by the CEO’s description of them.

The Chennai engineers sent a letter to CEO Sanjay Aggarwal, taking umbrage to the words Mr Aggarwal used for the engineers in his statement announcing a partial lockout of the airline until Thursday, 4 October.

“A series of protracted and unabated incidents of violence, criminal intimidation, assault, wrongful restraint and other illegal acts by a section of non-management engineering staff and illegally refraining from attending work by a section of non-management engineering staff and pilots which were all unnecessary and unprovoked commenced yesterday morning and continued today,” noted the letter released yesterday.

The Chennai engineers said they were pained by being described as “non-management” members and that they always considered themselves a part of the Kingfisher family, just like chairman Vijay Mallya did. The engineers contended that they stood by the airline through turbulent times despite going through months of hardships because of non-payment of salaries.

Given Mr Aggarwal’s “opaque” view on the situation, the Chennai engineers are joining the other engineers and no aircraft will be released from Chennai until a decision is arrived at, the letter noted.

Here is the full text of the letter:

Dear respected sir,

It is killingly painful that we have received a mail from you saying that the current scenario was arrived at because of our non-management engineers and other family members.

We are politely trying to emphasise that we have not been paid for so many months despite high embarrassment. Due to that, we have been unable to pay back money borrowed, for the survival of our families, from banks and others. But we continued to extend our support to the company.

Here, we never thought we would be differentiated and humiliated by the words that you have used. We always believed that we are part of the family and that is how our chairman Mr. Mallya terms us. We have shed our sweat, and numerous times even blood, to keep our aircraft flying on schedule since the airline was started.

Now we have been clearly differentiated by you in that we are not who we used to be.

The mail sent by you has an opaque view about the engineers, which we highly oppose. Hence, we are left with no other choice other than join hands with our other ‘family’ members in the current situation. NO AIRCRAFT WILL BE RELEASED FROM CHENNAI till the time a uniform decision has been obtained from all of our colleagues.

Highly disappointed,

Chennai engineering team