Air India puts European hub plan on backburner

New Delhi: Huge accumulated losses and a merger that’s yet to lead to the promised mega national carrier has forced Air India to defer its plans for setting up a hub in Europe.
Till some time back, the national carrier had zeroed in on two sites—Munich and Frankfurt—and was to choose one of them. Now with flights curtailed and no global expansion in sight till next winter, the European hub has been put on the backburner.
The idea of a European hub was to provide scissor operations there by taking passengers from different Indian cities and then providing connections to North America, like Jet does at Brussels.
“But at present we are not adding any flights so there’s no question of setting up this hub in a hurry. We will again start the process of selecting a city when the time is ripe,” said a top AI official. In fact, AI is not the only one to defer its plan for a hub. Jet is also reliably learnt to be keen on strengthening its Brussels hub first by linking it to Bangalore and other cities before going in for another European hub.
For AI, European hub is not the only thing that’s on the backburner. The merged AI-IA entity, National Aviation Company of India Ltd (NACIL), is now not going to start a domestic low cost carrier service.
22/09/08 Saurabh Sinha/Times of India

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Categories: Air India - International Sep 2008, Foreign Sep 2008, NACIL Sep 2008, New Sep 2008