Jet Airways

» see jetairways.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 17 April 2019 a Boeing 737 came into Mumbai from Amritsar and that was the end of Jet Airways. The lenders had met that afternoon and refused an emergency facility the airline needed to buy fuel, and the management told staff the same evening that every flight from then on was cancelled. Around twenty thousand people lost their jobs in a single announcement. Passengers holding tickets for the following week found out from the news.

The airline had been incorporated on 1 April 1992 under an air taxi license and started flying on 5 May 1993 with four leased 737-300s. India had just opened its skies after forty years of a state monopoly, and of the several private carriers that appeared in that window Jet was the one that lasted. It took scheduled status in 1995 and outlived almost every one of its contemporaries. International flying started in 2004, and by late 2010 the airline held 22.6 percent of the domestic market. If you flew inside India in that decade you very likely flew this airline, which is a sentence I am writing from the outside. India is a market I have never bought a domestic ticket in, and Jet reached me the way most foreign carriers do, as a name on a codeshare and a tail I did not recognize at a European gate.

The financial problem was visible for years before it was fatal. Jet bought Air Sahara in 2007 at a price the industry considered indefensible and spent a decade absorbing the loss. It ran a premium product against low-cost domestic competition that was pricing below it, on a fleet that was almost entirely leased, which means the monthly obligation did not fall when the revenue did. Etihad bought 24 percent in 2013 and put money in without taking control, and that bought several more years rather than a fix.

By March 2019 roughly a quarter of the fleet was parked because lessors had not been paid. Indian Oil cut off fuel on 5 April. Goyal and his wife left the board in late March in the hope that a lender-led rescue would follow, and it did not. On 17 April the banks decided that further lending was throwing money after a business that could not service what it already owed.

~ the record ~

~ the travel agent ~

Naresh Goyal did not come from aviation operations. He came from the agency side, having started as a cashier at a travel firm in the 1960s and built Jetair, a company that acted as the Indian sales agent for foreign airlines. That gave him two things when the market opened: a working knowledge of how airline seats are actually sold in India, and relationships with carriers across the Gulf and Europe.

It also shaped the company. Jet Airways was unusually good at distribution and at the customer-facing product, and it was run with the founder at the center of every decision for twenty six years. The governance questions that regulators raised toward the end, about related-party transactions and about the opacity of the ownership structure, are the same trait seen from the other direction.

~ the night it stopped ~

An airline that stops on a Wednesday with passengers already checked in is a different kind of failure from one that winds down. Jet had something over 120 aircraft on its books at its height and was down to a handful on the last day, the rest having been repossessed or grounded over the previous six weeks. Rival carriers hired its pilots inside a month and the government reallocated its Heathrow slots, which were the single most valuable thing it owned.

~ the airline that stayed legally alive ~

Most dead airlines are wound up and forgotten. Jet Airways spent five and a half years as a legal entity that was supposed to fly again. Lenders took it to the National Company Law Tribunal in June 2019 over roughly $1.2 billion of debt, and in 2021 the tribunal approved a resolution plan from a consortium of Murari Lal Jalan and the Kalrock Capital fund, who said they would relaunch it.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation renewed the air operator's certificate in May 2022. There were press photographs of a repainted aircraft and announced launch dates that moved every few months. No commercial flight ever happened. The consortium missed the payments it had committed to, and on 7 November 2024 the Supreme Court used its extraordinary powers under Article 142 to order liquidation and end the process. Five and a half years after the last landing, that is what actually closed the file.

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