Kingfisher – The Fall of the King of good times

I was always super excited whenever my parents told me that they have booked Kingfisher’s tickets for going out in holidays. The Kingfisher experience till date is one of my best flying experiences ever. But the sudden downfall of this king came as a shock to every person. People kept on wondering what the reason of this failure was. After a while the true answers came into spotlight. Let us have a look at some of the financial reasons why the king lost his throne-

• A merger with Air Deccan– An airline formed by Captain G R Gopinath in 2003. The fall of Kingfisher airlines started the very day when they bought Air Deccan. Air Deccan, the low-cost airline where passengers felt as if they were travelling in a public transport, was then struggling for funds. Capt. Gopinath, the owner of Air Deccan is a shrewd but smart investor who knew the right time to part his investment. The all-economy configuration of Air Deccan was rebranded and called Kingfisher Red, which continued to operate as its low-cost wing till recently. It is widely believed that Kingfisher merged itself with Air Deccan so that it could classify as an airline with five years of domestic flying in 2008, thus fulfilling requirements to fly international routes.. Kingfisher ended up spending Rs 550 crore on an airline that had losses of over Rs 550 crore.
• Bad decisions in good times– Kingfisher ordered all sorts of planes when the good times began rolling in 2005, including the four-engine long-haul jet Airbus A340 to connect the two silicon valleys, San Francisco and Bangalore. Typically, airlines order one or two class of planes to save on spare part, engineering and manpower costs. But, like the A380, the A340 too remained on ground for months, costing the company millions of rupees in rent. It never even made a commercial flight, and some joked that its stylish fittings, including in its toilets, made the planes too heavy to fly non-stop between Bangalore and San Francisco. Eventually, Airbus had to find buyers in Africa to redirect the Airbus A340 assets there. The airline started piling more costs as revenue shrank.
• Changing models-Kingfisher was launched as an all-economy, single-class configuration aircraft with food and entertainment systems. After about a year of operations, the airline suddenly shifted its focus to luxury. Kingfisher decided to change its model yet again—discontinuing its Kingfisher Red brand and completely converting its fleet to a dual class, full-service configuration. When an airline keeps changing its model and takes to random expansion, there is no time for the airline to stabilize.
• Mallya’s flamboyant nature-Kingfisher was gifted to Mr. Siddharth Mallya by his father on his birthday i.e. a Near Zero experience in running a company and the other CEOs appointed by Mr. Mallya didn’t prove to be very efficient. His over indulgence in parties and Kingfisher Calendar also lead to inadequacies in his finances. .IPL is also one of the reason for its downfall because it is known that much of the money was diverted to IPL from Kingfisher airlines, resulting which they defaulted in Loans and recently became a NPA (non-performing asset) to its leading bankers like SBI.

Will Kingfisher ever fly again? It’s a question of serious doubt.

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