Airlines’ expansion flying into infrastructure airpocket

BANGALORE: As if dwindling yields due to escalating operational costs and intense competition, which are sending airfares on a southward slide, was not enough, under-developed and ill-equipped small airports with good air-traffic potential are now beginning to hamper the expansion plans of airline operators, who want to grab a bigger marketshare through higher volumes.

For instance, Air Deccan was forced to withdraw its flights on the Delhi-Kanpur-Delhi, Lucknow-Kanpur-Lucknow and Mumbai-Nashik-Mumbai routes because Kanpur and Nashik airports do not having night landing facilities.

Air Deccan had to do this, despite a good flow of business traffic on these routes.

The budget carrier, which has seen its marketshare shoot up tremendously due to low fares and aggressive network expansion, also faces other constraints as shorter watch hours (operation hours) at these airports, which do not go beyond 6 pm.  All this made Air Deccan’s operations on the two sectors commercial unviable.

“These airports have a lot of business travellers, who ideally like to fly in the morning and return to their destinations in the evening. But sadly, these airports are not equipped to handle landings after sunset, disabling us to operate evening flights. In fact, Kanpur airport closes at 6 in the evening, which means that flights from Delhi would have to depart at 3 pm, making it impractical for business passengers.

“The airports also do not have visual approach slope indicator (VASI), which is a system of lights on the side of a runway that provide visual descent guidance information during the approach to a runway and assists in night landing,” said Air Deccan chief operating officer Warwick Brady.

Warwick says the airline may resume flights to these airports after one or two years. And it is not just Air Deccan, whose plans have gone awry because of tardy airport modernisation work of the Airports Authority of India (AAI), which has announced huge investment plan for improving infrastructure at small airports.

The route network expansion plans of other airlines have also been crimped because of inefficient airport management of small airports in the country. SpiceJet Ltd shelved its plans to fly to the centrally located Raipur because of an extremely short runway.

“Apart from a good load, flying to Raipur would also have helped us save on aviation turbine fuel (ATF) costs as the sales tax on ATF there is just 4% as compared to 30-40% in other cities. Fuelling at Raipur would have cut our AFT costs by over 40%,” says a SpiceJet official.

At Benares, too, where it has recently launched a flight, the airline seems to be on the back-foot because of shortage of parking bays and terminal space at the airport.

“On the one hand, we do not get slots at airports like Goa. On the other hand, inadequate infrastructure at small airports just do not make it viable for us to fly there,” says Sanjay Kumar, SpiceJet Ltd vice-president, sales and planning.

But airlines feel these problems are short term in nature. “I believe it will take some time for the government to match up with the explosion of growth in the aviation sector. It is a temporary setback, which airlines will have to bear with,” says Go Air chief commercial officer Raj Halve.

Go Air managing director Jeh Wadia, however, feels that despite these issues being short term in nature, they need to be urgently thrashed out through a dialogue between the airlines and the government.