Lufthansa seeks nod to fly A380 into India

New Delhi: India is so important a destination that German airline Lufthansa would pull out a super-jumbo A380 from one of its scheduled destinations to service the Delhi route, its CEO Carsten Spohr has said. “We will take an aircraft from somewhere else but one of them will fly to New Delhi,” he said. “We would have put Delhi on the list of first seven destinations rather than some other destination if we had a choice.”
Lufthansa has applied to introduce the A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft at present, on its Delhi-Frankfurt route. It has been over a year but there has been no word from the Indian government. Sources said permission was unlikely to come anytime soon.
“Part of the reason why the government refuses permission is because the likes of Air India and Jet Airways cannot compete with such a big capacity competition,” felt Saj Ahmad, London-based airline analyst from FBE Aerospace.
Spohr was more circumspect. “It is difficult to say what is stopping (the government). We really don’t know,” he told Hindustan Times. Giving the example of San Francisco, where Lufthansa became the first airline to fly an A380 last month, he said, “The idea of attracting more passengers into the market and making investments is what the Americans really appreciated.”
05/06/11 Tushar Srivastava, Hindustan Times

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Categories: Foreign Jun 2011, New Jun 2011