With a view to promote further regional connectivity, the civil aviation ministry on Thursday notified a separate category of permit for regional airlines christened, Scheduled Operator Permit for Regional Airlines. The permit will be applicable for both fixed wing and helicopter operators connecting one metro airport to smaller airports in the region.
To qualify for the permit, the applicant company will have to operate primarily between airports of any of the four regions, i.e., North, South, West and East/North East connecting one metro to other smaller Tier II and III airports in a respective region. Also, the companies would be allowed to operate flights from airports in their designated region to all airports in any other region except the metro airports of the other region.
Regional airlines would, however, not be permitted to operate on Category-I routes of the Route Dispersal Guidelines. As the Southern region has three metro airports, regional carriers operating in South would be allowed to operate between the designated metros of the southern region.
For example, a regional operator in the north can connect New Delhi airport with smaller airports in the region like Ludhiana, Shimla, Kanpur etc and also provide connectivity between these smaller airport. For South, the regional carrier will be allowed to connect the smaller airports like Mangalore, Madurai, Pondicherry, Tirupati with either Chennai, Bangalore or Hyderabad or all three of them.
The six metro airports as per the policy are Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. At present, there are around 80 operational airports in the country and 40 more are expected to become operation in the next two years.
The smaller towns are accounting for higher growth in air traffic. In 2006-07, while the passenger traffic at the metros grew at an average of 31%, stations like Port Blair, Nagpur and Raipur are registering traffic growth of 141.8%, 94.8% and 70.3% respectively. According to the data with the Airports Authority of India, of the top 45 airports, nine airports registered an increase of above 50% growth in passenger traffic including Hyderabad, Pune, Coimbatore, Mangalore, Nagpur, Port Blair, Raipur, Ranchi and Jaipur.
According to the new guidelines, the company would have to acquire at least three aircraft within one year and at the end of two years, it must operate with a fleet of minimum five aircraft.
For aircraft of and above 40,000 kg take off mass upto three aircraft, a minimum paid up capital of Rs 30 crore will be required. Addition of each aircraft would require an additional Rs 10 crore subject to a maximum of Rs 50 crore after which no further enhancement of equity would be required. For airlines with take off mass below 40,000 kg up to 3 aircraft paid up capital of Rs 12 crore will be required. For further two aircrafts total paid up capital of Rs 20 crore will be required.
The regional airlines will be required to pay lower landing and parking charges and as announced in the 2007-08 Budget aircraft, both turboprop and jet, below the weight of 40,000 kg would be able to purchase aviation turbine fuel attracting only 4% sales tax. ?In some time we will announce some further incentives for the regional airlines as smaller aircraft operated by national scheduled airlines are also enjoying these benefits,? civil aviation minister Praful Patel said.