The new owners of Jet Airways, Jalan Kalrock Consortium, today (March 4) announced the appointment of Sanjiv Kapoor as its new CEO. He will take charge on April 4.
“Sanjiv is a seasoned aviation professional who has the right blend and demeanour to stitch a team together,” Murari Lal Jalan, lead partner of the Consortium and proposed non-executive chairman of Jet Airways, said in a press release.
“I always believe in investing in human capital and by having Sanjiv as the CEO and Vipula as the CFO, I am certain Jet Airways will reclaim its lost glory and surpass everyone’s expectations.”
The announcement came days after the grounded airline appointed Vipula Gunatilleka as chief financial officer.
Who is Sanjiv Kapoor?
Kapoor is now president of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts. He served as chief strategy and commercial officer at Vistara, a Tata Group-Singapore Airline joint venture, from 2016 until 2019.
During that time, the airline grew from nine aircraft and 40 flights a day to 38 aircraft and over 200 flights.
Before that, Kapoor led SpiceJet, a low-cost airline in India. A Wharton MBA graduate, he began his aviation career with Northwest Airlines (now merged with Delta) in the US in 1997, where he worked in finance and corporate planning.
On his appointment as Jet CEO, he said, “Even though Jet Airways has been out of operation for three years, it still has a large fan base of loyal customers who miss it every day and can’t wait for it to take to the skies again.”
Jet Airways has been recently on a hiring spree across all verticles. The carrier plans to fly on domestic routes and then to foreign destinations in the second half of 2022.