Manis Arora: Why is airline travel still beyond the reach of the middle-class in India?
Ravindra Gupta: Aviation is a highly capital intensive industry. Despite the fact that 98% people travel by air in US, the dollar fare per minute, converted to Rupees is more than that in India. I feel the number of Indians travelling by air will grow tremendously in future.

Sajjan Gupta: What steps are you taking to put IA and AI back on rails?
Ravindra Gupta: IA has been earning profits for the last four years. Air India has been incurring losses. A number of economy measures, staff reduction measures, route rationalisation had been taken. Had the oil prices not hit the roof, Air India would have shown profit in the last financial year.

P.C. Sahajwala: What is the rationale for handing over four major airports to some private companies?
Ravindra Gupta: The government's concern is to have international class premier airports in the country. The lessees will bring investment for upgradation of airports.

Nirmal Singh: What will be the role of the civil aviation regulatory authority?
Ravindra Gupta: The authority will will be an autonomous body and will subsume the present DGCA. It will also have regulatory powers in the emerging privatised scenario. It will need government funding because by its very nature, it cannot be a commercial body.

S.K. Mitra: Why has Air India withdrawn from key European destinations such as Frankfurt when there is a big tourist rush?
Ravindra Gupta: In its route rationsalistion exercise, Air India has moved capacity from loss making/less profitable routes to more profitable routes. The airline is working out at a plan which will again enable it to touch more European destinations. Air India is also entering into joint flight/code-share arrangements with airlines of other countries.

Vijay Singh: What is the ministry doing for smoother clearance of cargo?
Ravindra Gupta: The export promotion board has been dealing with the problem on a regular basis. It involves upgrading infrastructure, simplifying procedures, use of latest technology and implementing an electronic data inter-change system. The EDI has now been implemented on all metro airports.

Vinay Rai: What does Air India's agreement with Virgin Atlantic imply?
Ravindra Gupta: Because of capacity constraints, Indian national carriers are not able to fully utilise the traffic entitlements. This creates avoidable shortage of capacity in the market. Indian carriers have therefore been advised to enter into joint flight/code-share arrangement with carriers of other countries in respect of unutilised traffic entitlements.

Vinay Kamath: Any plans to increase capacity for flights to the US and Europe?
Ravindra Gupta: All bilateral requests have been scheduled. 13 such requests have already been dealt with during the last two months resulting in an additional half a million seats both ways. All this capacity would certainly be in the market in the next winter. Remaining bilaterals would be completed in the next couple of month bringing further increase in capacity.