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Air India to wind up Frankfurt hub, take Alliance regional

The Air India management has some ambitious plans to turn around the loss-making national carrier.

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The Air India management has some ambitious plans to turn around the loss-making national carrier.

These include ceasing hub operations at Frankfurt, converting subsidiary Alliance Air into a full-fledged regional carrier and beginning domestic low-cost operation through Air India Express.

Already, plans have been finalised to stop ‘scissor’ or hub operations from Frankfurt, from October 31 and the six flights which converge there at present will be converted into direct operations to Europe and the Americas.

Not only will cancelling hub operations at Frankfurt save the national carrier `200-250 crore every year, this move will also bring in smaller Indian cities into the airline’s international network because the direct connections bring into the international fold cities such as Ahmedabad.

The current New Delhi-Frankfurt-Toronto connection would become Amritsar-Delhi-London-Toronto; Delhi-Frankfurt-Newark will become direct between Delhi and Newark and this may be extended to Hyderabad later.

The earlier practice of routing passengers from Ahmedabad, Delhi and Mumbai and from Chicago, Toronto and Newark to Frankfurt will be discontinued.

Then, official sources tell us the airline also plans to convert Alliance Air into a full fledged regional airline — which means connecting a major city with several smaller stations in each region.
At the moment, the Alliance Air hubs are only in Delhi and Kolkata and new ones may be created at Chennai, Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

This will improve overall connectivity within the country besides also allowing passengers from smaller Indian cities to get seamless international connectivity by linking up with Air India.

Also on the anvil is commencement of domestic low-cost operations by Air India Express.
But will all of this fructify?

“The airline’s management has been chalking out these ambitious programmes for a while now but how many have been implemented? It does not have planes for AI Express to even complete its international low cost routine; neither is the regional airline concept workable just yet. Everything hinges on the financial health of AI and till that improves, these measures will remain on paper,” official sources said.

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