IANS/New Delhi
Nearly 90% of Air India’s domestic flights were cancelled yesterday as almost half of the carrier’s 1,600 pilots continued their strike for the fifth day.However, it reported normal operations in the international sector.According to an official, the airline management sent an SMS appeal to the striking pilots to come back to the negotiating table.“An appeal was sent to the employees and especially to the ones of ICPA (Indian Commercial Pilots Association) via SMS stating that the airline is at a very critical juncture, financially as well as morally and that to reinstate the glory of the national carrier we all should come to the table and start a dialogue,” he said.Air India chairman and managing director Arvind Jadhav in his message also said allegations of corruption levelled by the ICPA would be probed.“Risking our airline’s survival at this time is criminal. We all condemn corruption in public life and the culprits must be punished,” the Air India chief said. The management also sent an SMS message to employees asking them to persuade striking colleagues to join back as the protest threatened its very survival.“In order to save our airline, I appeal to you to co-operate and persuade our pilot friends to return to work, and discussions - let us start afresh,” said the SMS message from Jadhav.However, hundreds of passengers were again stranded across the country as the pilots, despite facing a possible six-month jail for contempt of a Delhi High court order asking them to return to work, refused to budge.Air India reportedly cancelled and re-scheduled 170 of its daily 225 domestic flights yesterday.“We are operating only around 55 flights nationally, and have cancelled about 170,” a senior official with the operational arm of the airline said. The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) sought a probe into the “mismanagement” of the airline and said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should answer “who was responsible for the mess.”BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy, a former civil aviation minister, said that Air India was being run by the prime minister’s secretariat and added the possibility of a partial lockout could be a ploy to shut down the national carrier. Rudy, a trained pilot, said the government had asserted that the merger of Air India and Indian Airlines and purchase of new planes was a way to make the national carrier profitable. He noted the prime minister had said three years back that the functioning of national carrier will be improved and it will be again become pride of the country, but the losses of the national carrier had been mounting since 2007 merger - from Rs4.50bn soon after the merger, it had risen to Rs165bn. “The management gave different reasons each year for mounting losses. First they put it on recession in the Indian market, then on an increase in oil prices and still later on increased competition,” Rudy said.