Indian carriers pass international flyers' test

Mumbai: Statistics released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on Saturday showed that Indian carriers are slowly but surely catching up with foreign carriers. Though foreign airlines ferry a majority of international passengers to or from India, passenger preference has seen a slight shift towards Indian carriers in the last five years.
In 2004-05, for instance, 71% of passengers who flew international to or from India did so on foreign carriers. In 2009-10, that number fell to 66%.
But airlines such as Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines are several 'nautical miles' behind their foreign rivals like Emirates, Air Arabia, Qatar Airways etc when it comes to total number of passengers flown. In the year, 2008-09, only 95 lakh passengers flew Indian carriers on international flights as compared to the 1.93 crore who flew foreign carriers to/from India during that time.
"Indian carriers will continue to catch up, with airlines like IndiGo scheduled to launch international operations this year," said a top airline official. The percentage of passengers flying on foreign carriers to or from India has been decreasing at an average of 1.5% for the last five years. But the airline official warned against making a linear comparison between these figures. "One must remember that these numbers do not make a distinction between, say, a passenger flying to Singapore and the one flying to New York," he says.
14/02/11 Manju V/Times of India

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Categories: Foreign Feb 2011, Indian Aviation- In General Feb 2011