Why the headwinds against the Jet Airways relaunch are too daunting

Sudhir Gaur, acting chief executive officer, and part of the initial team selected by the Kalrock-Jalan consortium, which secured the National Company Law Tribunal’s (NCLT) approval last June to revive Jet Airways, has quit the company.

Finance head M Shivakumar and head of management information system Farazad Patrawalla left a few weeks earlier. Reviving Jet Airways, India’s best-run airline a few years ago, has looked like an impossible feat right from the time it “temporarily ceased” operations in April 2019.

And, although there has been no let-up in media speculation about Jet Airways about to restart operations since then, the chances were and remain bleak. As Rajnish Kumar, former chairperson of the State Bank of India, also wrote in his recently released book The Custodian of Trust:

A Banker’s Memoir: the beginning of the end of the airline started when its promoter Naresh Goyal, accompanied by an investment banker, approached the bank in 2018 to shore up its loans.