Terror strike may hit aviation industry

New Delhi: The domestic airline companies hoping resurgence in air traffic during the winter may hit hard due to the Wednesday terror attack in Mumbai, the business capital of India. The attack has certainly struck India’s tourism industry with falling passenger traffic.
In just two days, the domestic and international flights have seen a steep fall in inbound traffic load owing to one of the worst ever terror strike in south Mumbai, which took the toll of 130 and injured over 375. The Non-Residents Indians (NRIs) and foreigners, who usually visit India for tourism and for enjoying holidays are expected to cancel their tickets and several people have already cancelled their trip following the incident, sources revealed.
The price of air fuels have been slowed down, and it is expected that the airline firms may cut their airfares to boost the air traffic, which it had lost due to rising cost of airfares, said officials but ‘now the hope of rising traffic has been axed,’ added officer.
According to an official report, one out of five air passengers in India fly via or from Mumbai, and the terror incident would definitely have an adverse impact on the air traffic.
Besides Mumbai, airports in Delhi too witnessed a 30% drop in traffic in just two days. Due to lack of passengers, airlines are waving the number of flights and adopting the way to merge the passengers of two flights of the same route as Kingfisher did it on Thursday.
Kingfisher Airlines considering insufficient passengers combined the travellers of two flights: Delhi-Mumbai and Bangalore-Mumbai into one while it had also combined the flights from Mumbai-Hyderabad and Mumbai-Nasik into one.
Similarly, some international carriers have cancelled their flights, scheduled to depart Mumbai, while a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Mumbai was diverted to Delhi.
28/11/08 Noor En Ahmed/Newstrack India

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Nov 2008