Air India has confirmed that it has terminated a number of crew members from services for not reporting to work on time.

Without disclosing the exact number of crew members terminated, a spokesperson for the national carrier said that termination letters had been issued in the past twelve days in many phases, and that most of the terminated crew members used to attend long-haul flights.

Emerging reports suggest that AI has terminated the services of 16 air hostesses and one flight purser in the last nine days for not following flight duty time limitation (FDTL) rules.

The spokesperson claimed that the action was not off-handed as the management had been asking them to follow FDTL norms for more than six months but they failed to stick to the norms.

The spokesperson said, "The action is not off-handed. The management had been asking them to follow FDTL rules for over six months now but they failed to do so. We took the decision only after the indiscipline crossed the tolerance limits."

According to DGCA guidelines, a crew member should be on flight duty for 125 hours per month while a cabin crew association member flies, on an average, 57 hours as per their agreement with the national carrier.

While AI is asking crew members to report to work as per DGCA's FDTL guidelines, crew member unions are bent upon sticking to their stance of working 'less' number of hours as stated in their bilateral wage agreements with the airline's management.