After much delay, Air India would soon have its low-cost arm, Air India Express, serving the domestic routes in line with its competitors JetKonnect, JetLite and Kingfisher Red.
“Air India Express would soon start operations on domestic routes as the low-cost arm of Air India,” Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told the Parliamentary Consultative Committee attached to his Ministry.
He also informed the committee members about the turnaround in Air India, which has now started showing “a great deal of improvement, especially in the last quarter and promise of further improvement near future“.
Soon after taking over in May 2009, CMD Arvind Jadhav had said that Air India Express would soon start flying domestic routes. The national carrier’s fully-owned subsidiary already flies on Gulf and Southeast Asia routes.
Air India is the only airline that does not have a domestic low-cost arm though its competitors, Jet Airways and Kingfisher, have been running no-frill carriers for over two years now.
Addressing the committee, Mr. Patel said Delhi would have another plush terminal at the IGI Airport like Terminal-3 by 2016 to handle the rapidly growing air traffic.
While the passenger traffic in Delhi currently was 26 million a year, the integrated Terminal-3 (T3) has a capacity to handle 35 million per annum. However, this excess capacity is likely to be exhausted in a few years time and capacity augmentation would be required soon enough, Mr. Patel said.
Keeping this in mind, the master plan of the airport has been drawn up envisaging extension of the present terminal to accommodate additional traffic. “Along these lines, the next terminal T4 would come up around 2016,” he said.
