National carrier Air India to ply all-women crew flights on International Women’s Day

The airline announced on Tuesday (March 6) that it will operate flights operated by an all-women crew on several domestic and international routes. The announcement is a part of Air India’s series of events to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8.

According to a statement released by Air India, the carrier’s women employees will be operating a range of wide and narrow body aircraft in its fleet to celebrate the occasion.

Air India plans to fly these all-women crew flights to all the US cities it operates - San Francisco, New York, Newark, Chicago and Washington DC besides destinations like Milan, Frankfurt and Singapore. A few destinations in the domestic sector will also see the airline operating with an all-women crew.

Air India has said that a unique feature of its all-woman crew flights is that most operations from the cockpit to cabin crew, check-in staff, doctor, commercial staff, ground operators, to technicians, engineers, flight dispatchers, and safety and quality auditors are mainly performed by women.

The airline has been organising such events saluting women power and added that a series of cultural and creative events will be organised throughout its network on March 8.

Recently, Air India operated a flight on the Kolkata-Dimapur-Kolkata route with an all-women cockpit and cabin crew, as a part of International Women's Day celebrations on March 5.

Last year, the national carrier had flown into Guinness Book of World Records ahead of International Women’s Day. The airline had applied for a Guinness World Record and Limca Book of Records for deploying a flight around the world with an all-women crew. The flight had women staffers and professionals operating every aspect of the flight, right from the cockpit to the cabin crew, and even the ground staff, the Air Traffic Controllers, and check-in personnel.

The flight took off from New Delhi to fly over the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco and returned to New Delhi by flying across the other half of the globe, over the Atlantic, encircling the globe.

Air India’s record of plying all-women crew flight dates back to 1985 when the national carrier operated the world's first all-women crew flight from Kolkata to Silchar. In 2016, the airline had a total workforce of 27,500 people, of which was 3,800 were women and 20,500 of them, regular.