IndiGo’s new appointment brings focus back to expat vs Indian leadership debate in aviation

The move comes even as the world takes notice of the increasing number of Indian-origin CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Eric Garcetti, the US envoy to India, recently joked that you cannot become a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in America, unless you are from India.

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The landscape of Indian aviation is a study in contrast.

IndiGo’s top deck is led by foreign talent with both the CEO (Pieter Elbers) and COO (Wolfgang Prock-Schauer) being expats. Air India’s CEO (Campbell Wilson) and COO (Klaus Goersch) are also expats. The other Tata group airline, Vistara, has always had an expat CEO. The case was more or less the same with AirAsia India until Sunil Bhaskaran was appointed and the Tata group took a full stake in the airline, before its merger with Air India Express (which is still in progress).

IndiGo’s CCO for its CarGo venture Mark Justin Patrick Sutch is another expat in the top management.

When in operation, Go Air had one of the largest pools of expats CXOs.

SpiceJet, which has been struggling financially, is running without a few C-level positions after the departure of Shilpa Bhatia (CCO) and Arun Kashyap. The airline has not seen an expat at C-level since it got into a financial mess, though expats have led the company in the past.

Indian aviation has grown at breakneck speed, with fleet and passengers in domestic aviation doubling every nine-ten years. IndiGo, for example, has a fleet which is equivalent to what the entire country had when the company began operations.

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Interestingly, regional carriers have stayed away from expat appointments, which could be due to a mix of costs and the size of the airline. The longest running regional carrier, Star Air, has seen just one CEO since inception who has been a Ghodawat group veteran.

Grooming own talent

Over the years, IndiGo has replaced some expats with leaders from within or from other Indian airlines. The recent case was of Network Planning and Revenue Management department.

Expats have ruled the roost in other roles too at IndiGo such as Willy Boulter as CCO. The position currently lies vacant.

The aviation sector staffing is usually in the news about pilots and crew shortages. However, the aviation ecosystem is much bigger and involves Aircraft Maintenance Engineers (AMEs), sales, strategy, revenue management, planning, catering and many other departments for which formal training in India is yet to catch up.

Indian origin expats in India

From Sanjiv Kapoor, Vinod Kannan, Vinay Dube and Rono Dutta, there has been a large influx of Indians who are now foreign nationals but have served at the helm of Indian carriers or handled very critical roles and made a difference in one or more airlines.

Tail Note

While performance plays a big role in selecting key talent, but employing expats can be a costly proposition, especially for an industry which operates on wafer-thin margins.

It is equally important for aviation companies to groom the next generation of leadership which helps the next rung and beyond have a clear growth path.

Can Indian airlines groom their next generation of leaders? In an industry obsessed with pilots, and crew training institutes, there remains a large void of colleges and universities which have a syllabus and training which is specific to areas beyond flying.

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