Residents of smaller towns and cities could soon get more options to fly to bigger destinations. The civil aviation ministry is working on a plan to allow non-scheduled carriers like Invision Air and Freedom Airways to enter into code sharing arrangements with scheduled airlines like Air India, Indigo, Jet Airways and SpiceJet. The idea is that since smaller towns and cities have fewer flights by scheduled carriers, the non-scheduled ones could act as feeder services for the scheduled ones.
Non-scheduled airlines may carry passengers or freight between specified destinations but unlike scheduled carriers, they do not need to follow a regular schedule or publish their tariffs. In practical terms, they are seen more as chartered flights.
The code sharing proposal, if implemented, could increase the number of flights headed for, say, Delhi or Mumbai from a small town. The non-scheduled airline will bring passengers to a mid-point from where they hop onto scheduled ones flying to bigger cities. This will increase the connectivity to bigger cities from smaller towns, where such connectivity is low.
Explaining the rationale for such a proposal, civil aviation minister Ajit Singh told FE: ?We want to enhance air connectivity to smaller cities and towns. The non-scheduled airlines can offer feeder services to scheduled airlines like in many other parts of the world. However, we are yet to take a call on how to go about it?.
The minister, however did not set a deadline to implement the plan.
Industry analysts said the proposal sounds good but may be difficult to implement. They also expressed doubts whether non-scheduled airlines would be interested in any such scheme because they would have to rework their economics.
Non-scheduled airlines operate with smaller aircraft and do not have the obligation of insuring passengers. Their fleet size too is very small. For instance, Invision Airways currently has only two aircraft. If they want to enter into code-sharing arrangements with scheduled airlines, they would have to make more investments by buying not only more aircraft but also of bigger size. Further, they would need to maintain regularity of services and publish their schedule and tariffs. ?It remains to be seen if a company which is interested in the non-scheduled model would actually like to shift to the scheduled airline model,? said an aviation analyst.
Apart from co-opting non-scheduled airlines into the scheduled network, the aviation ministry is also planning to overhaul current route dispersal guidelines to offer more flights to smaller cities. Under the proposal, scheduled airlines will have to offer more flights from such places than what they have today.
Flight routes in India are divided into three categories ? I, II and III ? based mainly on the passenger load factor and revenue generation. While the category I are largely inter-metro routes between Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, the category II routes are mainly in difficult terrain and destinations in remote areas such as North-Eastern region, Jammu and Kashmir, Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep. Category III routes include cities like Kochi, Coimbatore and Pune.
The present guidelines make it mandatory for scheduled airlines to deploy at least 10% of their capacity on category I cities to category II routes and at least 50% of the capacity deployed on category I routes to category III routes.
For instance, if an airline has 10 flights to Mumbai or Delhi, it is obligatory under the norms for the carrier to have at least one flight to North-Eastern, Andaman and Nicobar or any other route under category II and have a minimum of five flights to cities like Pune, Kochi, Kanpur which are in category III. The ministry now plans to bring many of the category III routes in category I. This would automatically enhance flights to smaller places.