Category Archives: Aviation

During the second session of the 4th TravTalk Digital Conclave that focused on Revenge Tourism, Kamal Hingorani, Chief Customer Officer, SpiceJet, said that he expects leisure and corporate travel to resume by end of this year irrespective of whether a vaccine for COVID-19 is available or not. He added that there is a need for industry collaboration with a harmonised approach. “Let’s not waste a crisis. Invest in extreme hygiene and sustainability, and ROI will follow,” he commented. Hingorani also looks after inflight services, customer touch-points and corporate and industry affairs for the airline.

Virgin Atlantic has announced its plan to restart passenger flying, with services from London Heathrow to Orlando, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York JFK and Los Angeles set to resume from 20th and 21st July 2020. As countries around the world start to relax travel restrictions, Virgin Atlantic will resume some routes on 20th July, while steadily increasing passenger flying throughout the second half of 2020, with a further, gradual recovery through 2021 in line with customer demand. On this Juha Jarvinen, Chief Commercial Officer, Virgin Atlantic said, “As the CVOID-19 crisis stabilises and demand slowly returns, we are looking forward to welcoming our customers back onboard and flying them safely to their favourite destinations. To ensure the health and safety of our customers and our people, we’re introducing new measures at every point in the journey to offer peace of mind when taking to the skies with us.” “Our planned first flights will be to Orlando and Hong Kong on the 20th July, however, we are monitoring external conditions extremely closely, in particular the travel restrictions many countries have in place including the 14-day quarantine policy for travellers entering the UK. We know that as the Covid-19 crisis subsides, air travel will be a vital enabler of the UK’s economic recovery. Therefore, we are calling for a multi-layered approach of carefully targeted public health and screening measures, which will allow for a successful and safe restart of international air travel for passengers and businesses. We are planning to announce more destination restart dates in the next two weeks for the month of August.” Virgin Atlantic planned return to flying from London Heathrow Terminal 2* Flights will be loaded into systems …

The Empowered Group 6 (EG 6) constituted by Government of India and chaired by Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog, held a meeting with business leaders from the aviation industry and Ministry of Civil Aviation to discuss possibilities for strengthening operations and augmenting the recovery of the aviation sector under the new normal. The meeting was also attended by Pradeep Singh Kharola, Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation; Secretary, Department of Financial Services (DFS), which covers the functioning of banks, financial institutions, insurance companies and the National Pension System; and representatives of airlines such as IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir, AirAsia, Vistara and Air India.

IndiGo has said that it will keep adding new aircraft to its fleet even though it can’t give any firm guidance on future capacity growth because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The airline, the world’s biggest customer for Airbus SE’s best-selling A320neo jets, plans to return its entire fleet of 120 older, fuel-guzzling planes to lessors in the next two years, CEO Ronojoy Dutta said in a conference call with analysts and investors after the carrier reported fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday. “Almost all or close to all” of those aircraft will be replaced by new jets, Dutta said, without giving a time frame for that to happen. “We are in active discussions with Airbus — we will take a large number. It will all depend on the revenue picture and the pricing we get and so forth, but we will take a large number,” he added. IndiGo, which had earlier expected capacity to increase 20 per cent in the year ending March 2021, refrained from giving any guidance as it declared quarterly financial results. It posted a loss of Rs 8.7 billion for the fourth quarter ended March 31, compared with a profit of 5.9 billion rupees in the same period a year earlier.  

Suresh Prabhu, Member of Parliament, and former Union Minister of Civil Aviation has said that small businesses like that of tour operators and travel agents have to be helped, as they fuel the entire tourism sector. “We must find out how to help small businesses, because they are the lifelines of the overall ecosystem of the tourism sector. If there are no tourists, there will not be any airlines which do business of billions of dollars. However, those tourists will be brought to the airline because of the tour operators and travel agents—all those players actually make that ecosystem work and therefore we must realise that small businesses in this sector are crucial for sustaining larger businesses and even economy,” he said, while speaking at the PHD Chambers and WTTC Webinar, ‘Tourism, Hospitality & Transport Challenges’ by Bird Group.

Airports Council International (ACI) World and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have jointly issued a paper laying out a pathway for restarting the aviation industry – Safely Restarting Aviation – ACI and IATA Joint Approach. They have called on governments to ensure new measures introduced for airports and airlines in the wake of COVID-19 are consistent across the world. Any restrictions put in place should be supported by scientific evidence, they added. ACI and IATA are both central members the COVID-19 Aviation Recovery Task Force (CART) being led by the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Angela Gittens, Director General, ACI World, said during a webinar conducted by CAPA India on May 29, 2020, that, “Airports and airlines have come together with ICAO and the wider aviation industry to address the biggest challenge ever faced by commercial aviation in restarting a global industry while continuing to halt the spread of COVID-19. There is currently no single measure that could mitigate all the risks of restarting air travel but we believe a globally-consistent, outcome-based approach represents the most effective way of balancing risk mitigation with the need to unlock economies and to enable travel.” The joint approach proposes a layered approach of measures across the entire passenger journey to minimise the risk of transmission of COVID-19 at airports and onboard aircraft, and to prevent aviation becoming a meaningful source of international re-infection. Such measures should be globally consistent and subject to continued review, improvement, and removal when no longer required, to ensure an even recovery.

Tim Clark, President, Emirates, has said that the UAE flagship carrier could take around four years to resume flying to its entire network. The airline has grounded passenger flights owing to the Coronavirus pandemic and has only operated a few flights since then. “I think probably by the year 2022/23, 2023/24 we will see things coming back to some degree of normality and Emirates will be operating its network as it was and hopefully as successfully as it was,” Clark said in an interview at ATM Virtual 2020. Clark further added that the airline can activate its fleet within 48 hours if they must, but he feels domestic and international flights will start looking up only fort quarter 2021 once global inoculation starts. He doesn’t expect corporate or business travel will go down.

Venkataramani Sumantran has been appointed as an Independent Director on the Board of IndiGo, for a period of five years. He is currently Chairman and Managing Director of Celeris Technologies and has held this position since 2014. Sumantran has earlier served as Executive Vice-Chairman of Hinduja Automotive, UK; Executive Director of Tata Motors; and Director, Advanced Engineering in GM-Europe, among other roles.

An IATA survey reveals that once the pandemic has subsided and it is declared safe to travel, the one thing that would make passengers feel safer would be being able to see the sanitisation process being performed throughout the aircraft. Providing more insights, the survey also reveals that travellers would be equally convinced of the safety of being in an airport if they’re able to see for themselves its sanitisation.

Hardeep Sing Puri, Minister, Civil Aviation, has announced that they will be starting flights on one-thirds of the routes approved in the summer schedule of 2020 from May 25. The minimum and maximum fares for all the flights on these routes will be capped depending on the duration of the flight, which is divided into seven bands. He shared that the fare for the busiest route Delhi-Mumbai would be between Rs. 3500-Rs 10,000 and there will be three buckets in which seats will be allocated by the airline where they cannot exceed the prices in the first bucket by more than half of the price range of the rate capping.