Go FIRST surprised everyone by voluntarily filing for bankruptcy in May 2023. Plagued by issues with Pratt & Whitney engines, dispute with P&W over the award of Singapore Arbitration and mounting groundings led to the airline management deciding to get out of the airline business in a year which became the best ever for domestic civil aviation in India, surpassing the pre-COVID highs even with an airline less.
The battle for the airline was short lived as compared to the on-going and unending one for Jet Airways. While Jet Airways voluntarily worked with lessors to return the aircraft, Go FIRST took a different stance and lessors went to court and often from court to court to ensure that it can take away the planes. The airline had 54 planes at the time of grounding which comprised five A320ceo and 49 A320neo.
Finally, in April this year the Delhi High court directed regulator DGCA to de-register the planes and facilitate transfer. The condition of the aircraft had subsequently deteriorated since the grounding, with some being grounded even when the airline was operational. Things might have moved on the deregistration front but the access to planes meant a lot of work for lessors to get them airworthy and then fly them out of India.
This meant work for the MRO’s in India along with engineering companies, with government owned AIESL as well as private MRO players being roped in along with ferry pilots across the world being engaged to ferry the aircraft out.
The grounded planes were at Delhi (23), nine each at Bengaluru and Mumbai, five at Kannur, three at Nagpur, two at Hyderabad and one each at Ahmedabad, Kochi and Mopa, Goa.
13 planes out
From July this year until September, 13 out of 54 planes have flown out of India. The ones which have flown out include six out of 23 from Delhi, four out of nine from Bengaluru and one each from Nagpur, Mumbai and Kannur.
Planes flying out help the lessors on one side, but also the airports in India on another where parking bays become available to cater to the expansion that other airlines are chasing, which inturn helps the likes of IndiGo and Air India Express which are adding capacity.
With 13 planes out of India, nearly a fourth of all planes with Go FIRST have left the country with a handful others being in various stages of preparation. These include four A320ceo (VT-GON/GOP/GOQ/GOR) and nine A320neo (VT-WDA/WDC/WDD/ WGB/WGH/WGN/WGY/WJD/WJG).
Network Thoughts
The sad part of an airline going down is not just the loss to banks, employees and airports but the impact it has on other airlines from the lessor community getting into “Once bitten, twice shy” mode. In case of India, it has already been bitten multiple times and one can still see some Kingfisher Airlines aircraft in derelict condition at a few airports. This also impacts the passengers indirectly.
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thanks for this update. Nobody is reporting on this subject