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NEW DELHI: Surviving on tax-payers’ dole out, state-owned Air India has been reduced to a fishing pool for foreign airlines eyeing highly-trained pilots. Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways held a road show to hire Airbus A-320 pilots in Gurgaon on Sunday and Monday, and over 200 of the 300 Delhi-based AI pilots attended the event with their resume, sources say.
 
"The interviews and hiring process will begin in a couple of months. The number of AI (domestic, erstwhile Indian Airlines) pilots who went there was surprising. Almost three-fourth of the Delhi-based AI pilots went there," said a pilot who also took part in the show.
 
Etihad has gone on a hiring spree from India after tying up with Jet Airways and now aims to together challenge the market leadership of Emirates Airline — often called the de facto national carrier of India — here.

While pilots of other airlines that have A-320 fleet such as Gurgaon-based IndiGo also applied to Etihad, AI domestic pilots are a highly disgruntled lot. Their main grouse is the government’s failure to being in pay parity among them and their AI international counterparts. "AI is now one airline. Yet if an erstwhile AI and IA pilot fly together on the same flight, they get paid differently. This kind of discrimination cannot be tolerated. One wonders if UPA is really serious about AI," said a pilot.
 
Senior AI officials, on their part, maintain that pay parity is on its way — something they have been claiming for months. After this, they say, the only difference in erstwhile AI and IA pilots will be the wide body allowance which people flying twin-aisle planes will get.
 
Meanwhile aware of the disgruntlement in the airline and possibly seeing an exodus coming, AI is formulating a policy to ensure it does not lose money by training A-320 pilots on Boeing 787 (Dreamliner) only to lose them to other airlines. "Almost Rs 25 lakh to Rs 30 lakh is spent on training. We are planning to introduce a bond that such pilots will have to sign to ensure that that they either spend some years with us (to help us recover the cost) or pay us the same in case they leave earlier," said an official.
 
Gulf airlines have been ’poaching’ pilots from Indian carriers in the past few months with renewed ferocity. They are hiring for both narrow and wide-body planes. "We don’t want to leave AI, which has been a mother to us. But things are getting increasingly bad due to discrimination between AI and IA pilots," said a pilot.