I recently wrote about the various reasons for the fall of airlines in India where I went back in history and stared down at the top reasons why some of the 50-odd airline companies in India went bust. I found a lot of reasons which we are all familiar with, yet it is still surprising and interesting to learn about the series of complex events that eventually led to the death of some of the biggest and most ambitious airlines in India like ModiLuft, Damania, East-West, Huns Air, MDLR, and Paramount.
Here's a look at various airlines that went under for the same reasons that Jet Airways died a slow death in April 2019. The reason being cash crunch.
Defunct Airlines in India (Select List)
Following the closure update sent out by Jet Airways in late April 2019, I dug into various web portals including Wikipedia to see how other airlines had embraced death since 1928 when the Indian government (still under the Raj) bankrolled and set up an air service named Indian State Air Service serving Calcutta and Karachi. This is a list of all the airlines that I found had died the same way Jet and its subsidiaries fell one by one since 2012.
A list of airlines in India that went defunct because of financial problems:
- Air Carnival
- Air Costa
- Air Dravida
- Air Pegasus
- CityLink
- Mistri Airways
- Jamair
- Kingfisher
- RajAir
Even more interesting than these are other airlines that stopped their services because of issues like legal hassles, criminal activities, high competition, etc. Whatever may be the reason, all we now know is that the aviation industry in India is in a very volatile state now. Only confident lenders, not like SBI, can help these airlines like SpiceJet and GoAir stay afloat even as we embrace foreign direct investment (FDI) in the industry with the example being Vistara and AirAsia, two of the few airlines currently operating in India. TN.