Speaking recently at the update and outlook meeting of the PATA India chapter, Lohani said that aviation and tourism goes hand in hand. “Air India still has a lot of legacy issues which needs to be resolved. There were two different carriers merged in 2007 and it brought a lot of issues. There were many differences between the two companies in terms of work culture, areas of operation, compensation, working conditions, entitlements etc. We want to settle these issues. We are looking at consolidation and expansion both. In the last one year between December 2, 2015 and December 1, 2016, we added four new international destinations which is a big thing for any international carrier – Delhi – San Francisco, Delhi – Vienna, Ahmedabad – London – Newark, Delhi –Madrid routes. We are waiting for the arrival of few aircraft; some 787s are arriving. 777s will come in the first quarter of 2018. We plan to try to fix some new destinations. We plan to fly to six new destinations in 2017 i.e Washington, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Kenya or any other destination in Africa. We are looking at Frankfurt – Mumbai route. We have got the requisite clearances for direct international flights to Singapore and Bangkok from Chandigarh and they have been scheduled to take off before the end of March 2017. We are looking at adding six new international destination in 2017 and another six in 2018,” Lohani said and added that apart from 8 eight aircraft which is coming, we are also looking at at least inducting five more new wide body aircraft.
On the domestic side, Lohani agreed that having old fleet is one of the problems. “We have to retire these aircraft. We are adding 14 aircraft to our fleet in 2017. We have an order for 22 right now. The basic plan is to induct 100 aircraft between now and March 2020 to take the total fleet size to 230 from the current 132. We are working on Connect India programme of the Ministry of Civil Aviation. We have got eight ATRs. We will have a total of 23 ATRs by December 2017. We are looking at connecting Jaipur- Bikaner, Jaipur – Jaislamer, Bhopal – Indore –Raipur – Jabalpur. We will be launching similar operations from Mahrashra and Karnataka and all this is going to happen in 2017. We are looking at making Bengaluru or Hyderabad a hub for ATRs,” Lohani informed.
He said that the domestic expansion will be taken care of by Alliance Air. “It’s a regional airline. We expect it to turn around in 2017-18. We are very aggressive on that,” he added. He informed that Air India is going to launch first garland flight of India. In January this year, the carrier will launch Kolakata- Raipur- Indore- Ahmdeabad- Jaipur – Delhi flight which will star flying in return direction the next day. “We are looking at Dehradun, Pant Nagar, Lucknow, Bhopal, Patna,” he said adding that airline is a tough business, very different from hotel. “We posted an operational profit Rs 105 cr last year. This year we hope that operating profits be couple of hundred crores,” Lohani opined.
Speaking on the improvement in services, Lohani said that the services were the issues. “However, this has considerably improved. Earlier, we used to get only negative feedback but now are getting positive feedback also. Food is our USPs and I am emphasising on this. Our OTP has also improved. We continue to grow and continue to expand. We have to connect India to rest of the world. We have to connect all state capitals. Within the state, we are going to connect one region of the state to another region. We are open to suggestion and ideas. We want to fly profitably,” he said.
