Chennai, Jan 19: In days of pink slips and layoff, Paramount Airways is planning to recruit. The Chennai-based Airways is planning to hire 500 pilots and 600 cabin crew in the next two years as it plans to expand its business by increasing fleet size by five-fold by 2011.

The airline has currently five Embraer jets and will take delivery of another 20 aircraft by 2010-11.

"We employ 25 pilots and 30 cabin crew per aircraft. Accordingly the numbers will go up (with the addition in the fleet)," Paramount Managing Director M Thiagarajan said.

The airline, which offers only business and first class configuration, deploys a higher number of flight attendants than others.

"We deploy five cabin crew per flight against the industry average of two per flight for economy class," he said.

Currently, Paramount has about 125 pilots and 150 cabin crew members.

"We have already started our operations in Western India. We plan to saturate the market and be the most dominant player in the west by the end of 2009," Thiagarajana said.

OneIndia News (With inputs from Agencies)

Tags: paramount airways, chennai, layoffs, us financial meltdown, global economic crisis, embraer jets.