Earlier this month, Simple Flying got to speak with Akasa Air’s co-founder and Head of Operations Neelu Khatri, who said that the Middle East and Southeast Asia are on the airline’s radar for international flying. Following this, at the CAPA Aviation Summit in Delhi, the carrier’s Chief Commercial Officer, Praveen Iyer, gave further updates on where Akasa could be flying initially in these regions.
International destinations
Akasa Air has been tight-lipped about where it could fly internationally, mainly due to regulatory permissions and route allowances. Simple Flying analyzed the carrier’s offshore options a few days ago, taking into account the range of its fleet. The Middle East and Southeast Asia were obvious conclusions, but anything beyond that was anybody’s guess.
And while the airline has still not made any official announcements, its CCO Praveen Iyer has said that Singapore and several regions in the Gulf, such as Dammam (Saudi Arabia), Qatar, and Oman, could be the first few locations the airline could start with. At the CAPA aviation conference, Iyer said,
“We see a few markets where we don’t see capacity they should have. I can see Singapore, and a couple of markets in the Middle East and Gulf as well. Dammam is open skies. In the UAE, there are a couple of options barring Dubai, as well as Qatar and Oman. But, it is all about how airlines plan their networking.”
He further explained that Akasa began the application process earlier this month, and the real work will now begin, to decide where the carrier could fly to, given the constraints. Akasa has 19 planes in its fleet and is short of just one more to meet regulatory requirements of having a minimum of 20 airplanes to start international flights.
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Non-metro connectivity is still the focus
Meanwhile, Akasa’s CEO Vinay Dube stressed that the airline’s promise of connecting metro with non-metro cities in India is very much the focus of the top management. Speaking with Business Standard at the CAPA event, he said that Akasa’s network planning would center on metro-to-non-metro connectivity for the next one to two years. He added,
“Our focus is going to be on connecting the metros with tier-2 and tier-3 cities. While we do some metro-to-metro flying, we have got a lot of metro-to-non-metro cities like Bengaluru-Visakhapatnam, Bengaluru-Bhubaneswar, Bengaluru-Guwahati, and Bengaluru-Kochi.”
Akasa Air now has 17 destinations in its network and has reached the milestone of including all metro cities in India on its map. These include its most recent addition, Kolkata, and Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Pune. Its non-metro destinations include Bhubaneshwar, Kochi, Guwahati, Agartala, Visakhapatnam, Lucknow, Goa, Bagdogra, and Varanasi.
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Appetite for more
Akasa plans to grow swiftly in the coming years, with Dube earlier saying that its next order will be soon and in three digits, significantly more than the 72 aircraft it had ordered initially. The airline will also hire 300 pilots over the next 12 months to support operations and will need at least 3,500 pilots over the next ten years to fuel its growth.
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Source: Mint, Business Standard