Spicejet to hire 2000 laid off Jet Airways staff

Currently, SpiceJet has around 14,000 staff and a fleet of 100 planes. It is the fourth airline after Air India, the now-defunct Jet Airways and IndiGo to have 100 aircraft in its fleet.

SpiceJet has Boeing 737s, Bombardier Q-400s and Boeing 737 freighters. It operates around 575 daily flights to 62 destinations, including nine international routes, he said.

To a query on whether SpiceJet would look at operating wide-body aircraft that were earlier used by Jet Airways, Singh said the airline is right now focussed on narrow-body fleet.

"Having said that we recognise that there are gaps which have been created. They need to be filled and in the longer term, if India is to be a global aviation hub, Indian carriers will have to fly long haul. It can't be only Air India which flies long haul. The models (of business) for us may be different... I am sure every carrier is trying to see what can be done," he said on Saturday.

The airline is looking to have an 80 per cent capacity expansion in terms of Available Seat Kilometre (ASK), an indicator of seat capacity.

Jet Airways announced a temporary suspension of all its operations on April 17. The employees staged a protest at Safjurdung Airport in Delhi and at Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Airport against the government's inability to bail out the struggling airline.

Jet Airways shut down its service after it failed to secure sufficient funding to keep the airline afloat, thus becoming insolvent.

Four top Jet executives – CEO Vinay Dube, CFO Amit Agarwal, Chief People Officer Rahul Taneja and Company Secretary and Compliance Officer Kuldeep Sharma – resigned, plunging the defunct airline further into chaos. 

The exodus comes days after Gulf-based Etihad Airways made a non-binding bid offering mere Rs 1,700 crore for the airline. The airline's debt was pegged around Rs 15,000 crore, with some estimates putting it in excess of Rs 25,000 crore.