Air India on Thursday sacked 48 pilots who resigned last year but withdrew their resignations within the six months’ notice period time as per rules.

The withdrawal of resignations was accepted earlier only to be revoked suddenly on Thursday night. Their services have been terminated with immediate effect.

Some of the sacked pilots flew on Friday not knowing their services were terminated last night itself.

Indian Commercial Pilots’ Association has now written a terse letter to Air India CMD Rajiv Bansal, seeking “urgent intervention against illegal terminations of pilots”.

“We have only recently written to you bringing to light the bias and excesses of the personnel department towards pilots. The ink is barely dry on that letter and the Personnel Department is once again running amok, breaking all rules and the Law of the land. Yesterday night, around 50 pilots have received illegal termination letters from Personnel Department in blatant violation of Company’s Operation Manual and service rules,” the Pilots’ body said.

“Pilots who tendered their resignations as far back as July 2019 but later withdrew them well within the mandatory 6 months’ notice period have nevertheless been relieved from service suddenly starting from 10 p.m. last night. In fact the timely withdrawal has been acknowledged by the company in the termination letter dated 13.08.2020 which goes on to state ‘the earlier acceptance of the withdrawal of resignation by the company is dehors the law‘. How is this justified?” it added.