Kingfisher to go slow on new aircraft induction

New Delhi: Kingfisher Airlines Ltd, India’s second biggest carrier by passengers flown, is taking a cautious road to expansion and refraining from adding aircraft to its fleet of 66 this year.
The airline will instead use its existing aircraft and raise money through global depository receipts (GDRs) and a rights issue over the next 8-10 weeks, chairman Vijay Mallya said on Tuesday evening.
Mallya had earlier in February said in a statement the airline may look at inducting “new aircraft into our fleet sooner than planned so that we are fully geared to capitalize on the upturn”.
The airline is expecting the first lot of new deliveries from January.
Two of Kingfisher’s five wide-body Airbus A330 aircraft, which have stayed on the ground for around six months, now waiting for ministry approvals for the London-Delhi and Hong Kong-Delhi routes, will start flying this summer, while its A320 aircraft will tap the Bangkok, Colombo and Dubai routes.
“We are utilizing only three of them. We have two A330 idle and we have been incurring a fairly significant standing cost,” Mallya said.
“These two A330 will now operate on the Delhi-London Heathrow sector and Delhi-Hong Kong sector, so we will have better utilization and more revenue from these two planes,” he added.
25/02/10 Tarun Shukla/Live Mint

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Categories: Kingfisher Feb 2010