It is recruiting new Thai and foreign pilots while drawing up an emergency plan and seeking collaboration with other airlines and charter operators to serve passengers until Monday.

Patee Sarasin, chief executive officer of the domestic budget carrier, said yesterday that the company had finished compensating 40 per cent of the 3,000 passengers grounded by the cancellation of nine flights caused by a pilots’ strike on Sunday.

The compensation process followed the standard of the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand, he said.

The company has stopped investigating two of the eight pilots suspected of involvement in the work stoppage after finding that they had nothing to do with it. The investigation of five others is going on, while one has already been fired. The dismissed pilot had earlier accused Nok Air of forcing substandard captains to fly its aircraft. Patee, who has been Nok Air’s CEO for more than 12 years, argued that the airline had strictly complied with all standard practices.

The airline was going through organisational restructuring to upgrade its flight operations to the standards of the IATA (International Air Transport Association) Operational Safety Audit and the European Aviation Safety Agency.

This was part of its business plan to join with a partner in Europe to exchange flights during high and low seasons to reduce operational costs and increase revenue.

“The incident has made us delay our plan to begin the collaboration, originally scheduled for July, to early next year,” he said. Recently Sanit Kongpetch, a pilot and former manager of Nok Air’s flight standards department, who was fired in the wake of the cancellation of nine flights on Valentine’s Day, said the flights were scrubbed because of a shortage of pilots, not because of a strike.

The government has threatened to suspend or revoke Nok Air’s operating licence if the incident in which more than 1,400 passengers were stranded at Don Mueang International Airport is repeated. The Transport Ministry on Monday ordered all 14 Thai-registered carriers to submit flight-cancellation contingency plans to prevent a repeat of an incident like the one on Sunday.