Air India’s Rs 5 crore software a flop

A software installed to feed the data regarding the attendance, leaves and weekly offs of the national carrier Air India’s cabin crew, has became a source of trouble for the employees. Apparently, the software has some faults and it does not show the weekly off days of employees on their due dates, leading to chaos among the crew members.

According to the sources from Air India, the cabin crew has on several occasions complained about not getting the list of their weekly offs on the roster.

The airline has issued an internal circular amongst their cabin crew stating that there have been problems in feeding the list of the employees’ weekly off days into the software. As a result, the officials have to insert the details of the off-days into the system manually. This, claimed the sources, has defeated the entire purpose of installing the software and having the system automated.

A month ago, the cabin crew union of the airline pointed the problem out to the management. The crew said that saying that there were not getting their prescribed days off that gets counted as the mandatory rest. The mandatory rest is provided to the crew members between two flights. The civil aviation requirements for cabin crew mandates 24 hours rest in seven days and 36 hours rest with two local nights in a period of 15 days for international operations.

The crew members’ union had also demanded that they be given a hard or soft copy of the list of weekly offs. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation was also informed about the matter.

According to sources, the airline had bought the software ARMS 2 years ago after spending Rs 5 crore to automate the roster system but with these glitches, offiials end up feeding the system manually.

“This is a violation of the DGCA civil aviation requirements and hence the DGCA needs to address it immediately,” said K.V.J Rao, a union leader and former Air India cabin crew member.