Timeline: Leadership exodus is the latest piece of bad news at Jet Airways this year

If it wasn’t already dealing with enough, India’s oldest private airline is now running on an empty cockpit.

Jet Airways yesterday (May 14) said three of its top executives have decided to move on. Chief executive Vinay Dube (pdf) and his deputy Amit Agarwal (pdf), who is also the chief financial officer (CFO), have resigned on personal grounds, the company informed the stock exchange BSE. The airline’s company secretary and compliance officer Kuldeep Sharma, too, has quit (pdf). These exits are effective immediately. The chief people’s officer Rahul Taneja also reportedly quit on May 14.

The exodus comes nearly a month after Jet was grounded. Over 20,000 of its employees are yet to receive salaries for the past three months. In the meantime, its new owners, a bunch of lenders led by the State Bank of India (SBI), have so far failed to find a suitable buyer for the company.

“It’s really disappointing for us. Now there is no one in the official position with whom we can talk,” a Jet Airways employee told India Today following the exits. “…it is easy for everyone in the top to walk away. Only we employees will suffer. How can someone just walk away so easily leaving their employees in this situation?”

However, for a leadership team that has survived a slew of shocks since the beginning of this year, walking away may have been the only option.

From the exit of founder and chairman, Naresh Goyal, to the grounding of aircraft over the past several months, Jet has moved from one setback to another in 2019.

Here’s a timeline of how bad news has swept Jet in recent months: