Lufthansa looks for increased frequency to Indian cities by 2011

Pune: German airline major Lufthansa, which has lined up orders worth Euro 16 billion for acquisition of 160 new aircraft including 15 Airbus 380s and 25 Boeing 747-800s by mid-2012, is looking for a further increase in the frequency of its services to various Indian destinations in 2011.
"We are getting a lot of these aircraft by 2010-11 and obviously, they will have to fly somewhere. The Indian market offers us a big potential," said Lufthansa's south Asia Director Axel Hilgers, while speaking to reporters here on Thursday.
The question remains, will the India airports presently served by Lufthansa be ready to handle the 500+ seater jumbo aircraft like A-380s? "We hope the New Delhi airport may be first to upgrade itself to the demands of handling such huge aircraft, going by the schedule of the ongoing expansion work there in view of the Commonwealth Games 2010," he said.
Hilgers, who took over as the head of Lufthansa's south Asia operations in January, last year, was on his maiden visit to Pune to announce a change in the Pune-Frankfurt flight pattern besides holding interactions with representatives of the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce and key German corporates like auto major Volkswagen.
As of now, Lufthansa operates flights to seven Indian destinations__New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata__with a frequency of 52 flights for the ongoing winter schedule of the airliners. "We plan to increase the frequency to 53 flights in the forthcoming summer schedule, starting end of March, by reintroducing daily flight service between Bangalore and Frankfurt. The service was earlier curtailed to six days a week," he said.
08/01/10 Times of India

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Categories: Foreign Jan 2010