NEW DELHI: Air-India Ltd yesterday said its low-fare unit Air-India Express was forced to cancel flights to the Gulf after eight pilots resigned as an aviation boom leads to a shortage of people qualified to fly planes in the country.

The airline halted three flights each from Mumbai and New Delhi to destinations including Abu Dhabi and Muscat, the airline said in an e-mailed statement.

Six commanders and two co-pilots had resigned, said Air-India Express.

Experienced pilots and flight crew members are in short supply in India amid accelerating growth in the country’s aviation industry, where four new airlines have started flying in the past two years and at least six are awaiting approval to begin business.

“The shortage of pilots is a serious crisis that is going to snowball even further,” said Kapil Kaul, chief executive officer of the New Delhi unit of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation.

“I don’t think the airlines in India have a good long-term answer to this problem at the moment.”

Sahara Airlines and other Indian carriers have this year cut schedules because pilots resigned and joined rival airlines, prompting the government to mediate on poaching. Sahara lost more than 20 pilots this year to carriers such as Air-India Express, SpiceJet and Kingfisher Airlines.

The Air-India Express pilots “have deserted the airline without giving the required six-month notice,” the airline’s statement said, without giving details.

Jitender Bhargava, a spokesman for Air-India, didn’t return three calls seeking details on the resignations.

Air-India Express started flying to Gulf in April and operates 38 services weekly to cities in the region using Boeing 737-800 aircraft.

India has about 2,500 pilots and would require as many as 5,000 more in the next seven years as more airlines start to tap rising traffic, Kaul said.

“In the short term, airlines are resorting to hiring pilots from overseas but that’s not going to be a long-term solution,” Kaul said.

Deccan Aviation, which flies the Air Deccan low-fare carrier, has 70 pilots from overseas of its total 200 pilots. The Bangalore-based airline has hired pilots from countries including the United States, Singapore, France and Algeria, managing director G R Gopinath said.

“I am concerned about this problem and I want the government to address it on a war footing,” Gopinath said.

He expects to recruit 800 pilots in the next five years as the airline buys more planes from Airbus.

India’s civil aviation ministry in April asked all the airlines in the country to establish a “code of conduct” in taking over pilots, engineers and other trained staff from rival carriers.

Sahara Airlines, the nation’s third-biggest domestic airline, in May filed a suit against SpiceJet and Kingfisher Airlines asking them not to poach pilots. – Bloomberg