Air India to use wide-bodied planes on domestic routes

A day after Air India’s pilots, owing allegiance to the Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA), called off their 10-day old strike, domestic operations of the national carrier were limping back to normal on Saturday.Taking stock of the situation after the pilots have started reporting for duties, Air India management is giving another look at the domestic operations. Plans are afoot to deploy wide-bodied aircraft like Airbus A-330 on couple of major metro routes to offer enhanced capacity.

Sources in the airline said that Chennai-Bangalore-Delhi and Delhi-Mumbai could be two major routes which could see a wide-bodied aircraft being pressed into service, offering 290 seats per flight. Such flights would be called "breakfast" and "dinner" flights, the sources added. 

"Over the next four to five days, we plan to offer a total of 35,000 seats daily on our domestic network and for the first time the airline will use A-330 type of aircraft which was also used to clear passenger rush during the strike period," the sources said. A single flight of a wide-bodied aircraft can take the passenger load equivalent to three flights of a narrow-body aircraft like Airbus A-320. 

According to estimates made so far, Air India suffered a revenue loss of about Rs. 160 crore due to the strike by the ICPA pilots whose strength was put at about 800. The national carrier is also making efforts to stabilize fares on its domestic network with the stress being on ensuring total revenue on each domestic flight, realising that it was important for each seat on an aircraft to be filled up. It may also pull out of some of the loss-making routes while trying to have connections like Delhi-Ranchi-Kolkata or Delhi-Raipur-Chennai. 

On the international front, after having single code of "AI" the flag carrier is all set to join the Star Alliance, the global network of major carriers that will enable it to offer seamless travel to and from India from any city in the world. Air India should have joined the Star Alliance about two years ago but due to problems of integration in its IT network and ticketing, the date was pushed ahead. The sources indicated that the airline was likely to join the Star Alliance by this July-end.

Courtesy : The Hindu