As a result, not only will the airline suffer a sharp drop in its load factor, but also face the possibility of operating a near empty aircraft. ``Forget the passengers, even the aircraft maintenance engineers and pilots are confused,'' stated sources.

``For instance, flight IC 689 on the Mumbai-Vadodara-Mumbai sector was withdrawn in the schedule earlier, and obviously, no booking was done on this flight. However, the flight has been suddenly reintroduced today, tobe operated daily and leave Mumbai at 3.40 pm. As this change was made within a day of the new schedule coming into effect, only a handful of seats have been booked on the flight,'' they added. Similarly, IC 629 on Mumbai-Nagpur sector, which was to leave Mumbai at 3.15 pm, will now have to leave at 7.00 pm. And an A 320 by an A 300 has been replaced at the last minute on the two services on the Mumbai-Bangalore-Mumbai sector. Both flights IC 105 and IC 109 leaving Mumbai at 6 am and 10.40 am respectively were operated by an A 320, having a capacity of 140 passengers. However, they have been replaced with an A 300, which has a capacity of 240 passengers. ``Considering the Mumbai-Bangalore fare of around Rs 4,000, the plane will fly with almost 100 passengers less, leading to a straight loss of Rs four lakh to the airline on just one trip,'' sources said. ``In any private airline, planning personnel would have been sacked for this.'' Meanwhile, an official press release merely stated that flights would now beoperated as per the new timings. Accordingly: