New Delhi: If cutting down loss-making routes is the most sensible way to slash losses of an airline, then critically ill Air India could well be advised complete bed rest. It is able to recover costs only on two of the 175 routes operated by the erstwhile AI and Indian Airlines. These two routes are: Delhi-Tokyo and Tokyo-Delhi.
In all the other 173 routes, the airline is either not able to recover fuel cost, cash cost or the total cost. Eight flights like Amritsar-Delhi-London, Delhi-Dubai and Amritsar-Delhi-Toronto are not even able to make enough money to pay for the fuel expense. On domestic sector, three metro flights (even Mumbai-Delhi and Delhi-Chennai of certain time slots) were found to be in the same state.
These startling revelations came as the airline management did a six-month survey of all routes from April to September, 2011, to see how losses can be cut. Now the worried top brass has set up a panel to examine how the timings or frequencies of the national carrier's flights can be tweaked so that they can get better passenger loads and cut losses. The airline has a life-threatening debt-losses combine of over Rs 62,000 crore.
The biggest worry for the current authorities is that they have to prepare a credible-sounding turnaround plan on the basis of which UPA-II will be able to justify pumping in thousands of crores of taxpayers' money into AI to keep it alive.
09/11/11 Saurabh Sinha/Economic Times
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