Tumultuous year for Indian aviation
But problems of infrastructure like storage and transportation of jet fuel to airports, which are controlled by the oil marketing firms, remained to be solved.
To check high fares, government decided to do away with the airport development fee being charged from passengers coming to and going out of Delhi and Mumbai airports from January and asking Airports Authority of India not to charge it at Kolkata and Chennai airports being developed by it.
The AAI was also asked to infuse more equity in the joint ventures operating the Delhi and Mumbai airports.
Air India also inducted the first few of the 27 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and put them into service in select domestic and international routes.
With these next-generation planes, the national carrier announced launching of new flights in its bid to expand its route network and resuming closed down domestic services, aiming to corner more passenger traffic.
A series of initiatives in this regard saw improvements in its passenger loads, revenues and some stemming of its losses.
The government also decided to hive off Air India's engineering and ground handling services into two wholly-owned subsidiaries.
The long-awaited integration of staff of the two erstwhile carriers (Indian Airlines and Air India) finally took shape after five years of their merger, with the implementation of the recommendations of the Justice Dharmadhikari Committee.
Playing a pro-active role, government also considerably opened up the air services agreements (ASAs) with other countries, allowing all Indian airlines to take advantage of it and
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