Financially-stressed Jet Airways will temporarily suspend all flight operations from Wednesday night as it could not arrange an emergency funding of Rs 400 crore for maintaining bare minimum operations, sources said on Wednesday.
The airlines had earlier applied to deregister another four Boeing 737 planes, reducing its operational fleet even further.
On Monday evening, the airlines had informed that it had time till Tuesday afternoon to pay fuel vendors failing which it might have to ground its operational fleet.
Going by the sources in the industry, the company is almost out of funds and is relying only on the negligible funds being infused by lenders on an expense-to-expense basis.
Till Monday, Jet was operating only 7 aircraft for domestic operations due to the grounding of over 80 per cent of its fleet by lessors owing to non-payment of dues.
The airline, that once operated around 120 aircraft, is now left with just 16 planes in its fleet. It owes over Rs 8,000 crore to a consortium of lenders led by the state-run State Bank of India (SBI).
Jet Airways’ founder chairman Naresh Goyal has already withdrawn from making a bid for a stake in the company.
Also, fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya extended solidarity with Jet Airways and its founder Naresh Goyal while attacking the government alleging that it was discriminating between the public sector and private airlines.
In a series of tweets, Mallya expressed his sympathy with other airlines too which have been fighting for their survival.
Saddled under heavy debt, Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines shut shot in October 2012.