Kingfisher grounds 20% flights

Bangalore: Kingfisher Airlines, India's second-largest airline, has slashed 20 per cent of its domestic flights and is now operating around 440 flights. The company, which recently started its overseas flight connecting Bangalore to London, is also understood to be initiating discussions with Singapore Airlines for a code-sharing pact. The airline recently got the required nod for increasing its overseas flights by connecting Mumbai to Hong Kong and Singapore; and Bangalore to Colombo, Male and Dubai.
Industry sources indicate that Kingfisher’s Bangalore-London flight is operating at a little over 50 per cent load factor and the basic drawback on this operation is that there are no adequate connecting flights for a seamless travel. While the company did confirm that it has slashed 20 per cent of its domestic flights and its Bangalore-London flight is operating at a 50 per cent load factor, it offered not to comment on the code sharing discussions. The company is going through a overhaul of its intended plans to fly overseas even as it cancelled its much discussed direct flights to San Francisco from Bangalore.
The airline, which is hoping to be operationally profitable for the month of December, is understood to have leveraged debt more than 10 times on an equity base of Rs 256 crore, even as it tries to raise Rs 1,600 crore through equity dilution.
01/01/09 Raghuvir Badrinath/Business Standard

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Categories: Kingfisher Jan 2009