A-I tackles loss-making routes

New Delhi: As a part of cost-cutting measures, national carrier Air-India has halved its domestic subsidiary Alliance Air's capacity on certain loss- making routes by deploying much smaller aircraft for the operations.
Alliance Air, now known as Air-India Regional has replaced the 120-seater Boeing 737 with the 70-seater, Bombardier-manufactured Canadian Regional Jet (CRJ) for routes like Delhi-Vizag and Delhi-Ranchi.
This development, along with the decreased number of flights per week from 7 to 6, has exactly halved Alliance Air's weekly capacity deployed in these sectors. The total number of seats deployed in these routes per week has come down from 840 to 420.
According to company sources, other sectors tentatively looked at are Delhi-Ahmedabad, Delhi-Ranchi, Chennai-Vizag, Chennai-Bhubaneshwar, etc as more such jets are delivered to them.
"Going by the order, there is a clear scope to cover all regional routes, which have a duration of around two hours, while the shorter routes like the north-eastern destinations are operated by ATRs," said an aviation expert. Alliance Air has 6 ATR aircraft, which service areas like the North-East.
This is one of the starters for the slew of cost-cutting measures undertaken by the company to curtail its losses. Inclusion of Alliance Air's Rs 300 crore loss into Indian Airlines' accounts was the sole reason for its accrued losses of Rs 250 crore for 2006-07 instead of a profit of Rs 50 crore.
28/12/07 Anirban Chowdhury/Business Standard

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Categories: Air India Regional Dec 2007, NACIL Dec 2007