India sitting on unused flying rights

Indian air carriers are well behind foreign peers in utilising the traffic allocated under the bilateral services agreements India has signed with 109 countries.
There are 834,000 weekly seats on international air routes connecting all these countries with India. The Indian airlines have been able to utilise only 22.7 per cent of the total seat allocations. Air India utilises 11.9 per cent and the other four private carriers that fly abroad utilise a combined average of 10.8 per cent. International carriers utilise 37.9 per cent of the total. (All flights together fill only about 60 per cent of the seat allocations, done in absolute numbers, under the agreements).
A big part of the Indian problem is the civil aviation ministry’s sitting on applications to fly abroad, to protect the interest of government-owned Air India. The latter is losing huge amounts of money and the ministry feels allowing any carrier to ply abroad, for the first time or to expand, would further hit AI.(Click here for table & graph)
A top airline official said this attitude hampered their growth and that of airports. “Not allowing us when the international carriers are utilising almost all their bilateral seats is not proper. We had made plans for the winter schedule that is currently on and the coming summer schedule but all our requests for permission are pending with the government,” he said.
29/12/11 Mihir Mishra/Business Standard

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