The country’s first private greenfield airport, Durgapur’s Kazi Nazrul Islam Airport (KNIA), developed by Bengal Aerotropolis (BAPL), which began its operations on May 18, is expected to cater to 0.5 million passengers a year from the first year of its operations. Home to several power-intensive industries, the rapidly industrialising Asansol-Durgapur belt, is poised to feed a million air passengers a year by FY19. Though, Alliance Air, a subsidiary of the state-owned Air India, is currently the only airline to fly to the airport, low-cost carriers (LCCs) Air Costa and SpiceJet are in talks to start their operations, which could commence as early as September, Partha Ghosh, managing director of BAPL tells FE’s Rhik Kundu. Excerpts:
What kind of traffic do you expect at the airport?
The current capacity of the airport stands at a million passengers a year. Though, we expect only 0.5 million passengers in the first year of operations. It could increase to a million a year by the financial year 2018-19. The Durgapur-Asansol region is a busy industrial belt which sees a huge number of people traveling to nearby cities like Kolkata, Bagdogra, Cooch Behar and major metros like New Delhi and Mumbai. KNIA caters to this traffic. At present, Alliance Air flies to Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai, Bagdogra and Cooch Behar from KNIA. More airlines are expected to start their operations shortly.
Which are these airlines?
We had originally started discussions with IndiGo and GoAir, however, those talks didn’t work out since we couldn’t agree on the type of concessions they were asking for. Currently, we are in talks with SpiceJet and Air Costa, who could start their operations as early as September after adding additional aircraft to their fleet. At present, most airlines are watching the traffic at the airport. Air India, which flies a smaller ATR 42-320 aircraft in this route, could also switch to a bigger Airbus A 320/A 321 aircraft, if the traffic picks up further.
How do you plan to attract LCCs to the airport, considering they seem to be the best suited for the regional airports?
Airline operators can save up to 9-10% on jet fuel since value added taxes (VAT) on aviation turbine fuel (ATF) have been slashed in West Bengal. We also expect a lot of people, especially who were earlier traveling on AC two-tier and first class, to take flights now. About 1 million people, who live in the 70 kilometer radius around Durgapur city that consists of places like Dhanbad, Deogarh and Chittaranjan, among others, travel extensively every year. We hope to cater to this traffic and also provide them an opportunity to switch to flights from trains. I belive this conversion will happen the moment LCCs start their operations from the airport. So getting a million passengers a year at the airport is not going to be a very difficult task for us.
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