Days after Jet Airways, under its new promoters, Jalan Kalrock Consortium (JKC), obtained an air operator certificate (AOC), the airlines on Monday announced new appointments for its leadership team.

The team includes Prabh Sharan Singh as Chief Digital Officer. Singh had previously worked with Etihad and Kingfisher Airlines. At Etihad, Singh led transformational initiatives, redefining business by promoting digital transformation and creating innovative strategies. Singh will take charge from June 1.

MRO head

HR Jagannath, who has been brought in as Vice-President – Engineering, and takes charge from Monday, had previously been Chief Executive Officer of Air India Engineering Services (Air India’s MRO subsidiary). During the four decades of his service at Air India, he was instrumental in setting up MRO facilities in India, including those at Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur, and Hyderabad, and in establishing the company’s overseas branch offices with line maintenance set-ups. He also led the delivery of two specially configured Boeing 777 aircrafts to the Indian Air Force for VVIP operations.

Inflight services

Mark Turner, who has been appointed as the airlines’ Vice-President – Inflight Product and Services, will take charge from June 15 and was a part of the older Jet Airways’s (under Naresh Goyal management) in-flight services team between 2008 and 2011. An aviation industry veteran with over 40 years of experience, Turner has been engaged in start-ups, re-brandings, re-launches, and business transformational projects across geographies and has held senior management positions at Gulf Air, Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Fiji Airways.

“At Jet, Mark will be overseeing cabin crew operations, training, and service development, inflight product development, and catering,” the Jalan – Kalrock Consortium said in a statement.

Vishesh Khanna, new Vice-President – Sales, Distribution, and Customer Engagement, will take charge from July 2022. Khanna, another industry veteran, joins the airline from VFS Global Ltd, where he serves as Business Head e-Visa. He has nearly 30 years of experience in the aviation and travel sectors across B2C and B2B sales, having held executive positions at various airlines in the past. Prior to joining VFS Global, he was Vice President – Sales for India and Overseas Markets at Vistara (a Tata-Singapore Airlines JV), where he built the sales function from the scratch. He also has prior experience in working with Kingfisher Airlines and IndiGo. At IndiGo, he had set up the latter’s corporate sales function during the carrier’s initial years, as well as with InterGlobe Technology Quotient(Galileo India) in a similar role.

Earlier this year, the consortium had appointed Sanjiv Kapoor as CEO and Vipula Gunatilleka as CFO.

Other appointments include Capt PP Singh as Vice President – Flight Operations and Accountable Manager; while Alphonso Dass was appointed Vice President – Airports & Airport Training.

Nakul Tuteja was appointed as Vice President – Human Resources & Administration.

Rebuilding Jet

According to Sanjiv Kapoor, Chief Executive Officer, the team shares a joint sense of purpose and passion of rebuilding Jet as India’s most people-focused and loved airline, updated for the digital age.

“I am looking forward to working with them to create history,” he said.

The airline management said, it intends to recommence commercial operations in the “next quarter of this year” that is during the July-September period.

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