Anand Mahindra turns focus to aviation

India's entrepreneur of the year, Anand Mahindra, has a fresh field to conquer: making passenger aircraft, aided by some Australian expertise.
It’s a market of considerable size. In the Asia-Pacific region alone, Boeing estimates that airlines will spend $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years on as many as 9000 new planes.
Mr Mahindra, vice-chairman and managing director of the $7 billion conglomerate that bears his family’s name, aspires to turn the group’s aerospace arm into an Indian version of Embraer, the Brazilian plane maker which builds a range of aircraft up to the size of a regional jet.
But the Mahindra brand is better known for its tractors and utility vehicles, and building a regional jet is a complex and time consuming business that usually starts with the production of much smaller turbo prop aircraft.
It took Embraer – formed in 1969 by the Brazilian government and privatised in 1994 -- more than 20 years before it built its first passenger jets in the early 1990s.
To speed up the process, three months ago Mahindra agreed to pay about $40 million for a controlling stake in two small Australian aviation companies, Gippsland Aeronautics and Melbourne-based component maker Aerostaff Australia.
Gippsland Aeronautics, based in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley and maker of the popular 8-seat GA8 Skyvan utility plane, plans to beef up its range next year with an updated 18-seat version of the controversial Australian-made Nomad twin turbo-prop. It bought the rights to the Nomad’s type certification in 2008.
The Nomad, designed in the late 1960s and built in Melbourne by the old Government Aircraft Factories between 1971 and 1984, saw service with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and a variety of other civilian and military operators in Australia and overseas. About 170 examples of the Nomad were built, in variants from 12 to 18 passengers. But its reputation suffered from a run of fatal crashes, and the Australian Army retired its Nomad fleet in 1995.
30/03/10 Geoff Hiscock/The Australian, Australia

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Foreign Mar 2010, Indian Aviation- In General Mar 2010, New Mar 2010