KOCHI: Budget carrier Air India Express celebrated Women’s Day on Thursday by operating eight international all-women crew flights. All women-crew flights took off from Kochi, Kozhi-kode, Thiruvanantha-puram, Mumbai, Chennai, Mangalore and Delhi. The airline also felicitated all its women/girl passengers traveling on the women’s day with sweets and flowers. Functions were organised at all its offices to felicitate the women work force of Air India Express which is about 40 per cent of its total employees.
As an awareness campaign, Maithri, a Kochi-based NGO, in association with Air India Express, circulated its helpline numbers through a specially-designed greeting card, among all its women passengers and employees at the airports and its offices. The flights were operated in the Kochi-Dubai-Kochi (Captains Chameli Krottapalli and Gangurde Manjiri and crew), Kozhikode-Abu Dhabi-Kozhikode (Captains Sanghvi Ami M.S. and Prachi Sahare and crew), Kozhikode-Dubai-Delhi (Captains Rashmi Mehrum and Srishti Singh and crew), Thiruvananthapuram-Muscat-Thiruvananthapuram (Captains Ishika Sharma and Masood S. and crew), Mumbai-Dubai-Mumbai (Captains Jesmin Mistry and Kainaz Vakil and crew), Chennai-Singapore-Tiruchirappalli (Captains Kavita Rajkumar and Medha Ghosh and crew), Mangalore-Dubai-Mangalore (Captains Rawal Saloni and Priyanka C. Rane and crew) and Delhi-Abu Dhabi-Delhi (Captains Singh Priti and Arushi and crew) sectors.
At the Cochin international airport, Airport Authority of India women officers took control of the skies by taking over the control of the most of the crucial positions in the air traffic control (ATC) wing and communication navigation surveillance (CNS) wing. ATC controls more than 370 aircraft movements in the airspace under the jurisdiction of Cochin. More than 25 percent of total employees of AAI working in Cochin are women working in ATC and CNS wings. The co-ordination in charge R S D’Cruz congratulated the women staff on the occasion.
