The airline, which initially stayed away from the city due to congestion, is in talks with Mumbai International Airport Ltd’s management
Low-cost carrier AirAsia India is currently in talks with the management of Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) to start operations from country’s most congested yet important airport in the city.
Though the airline management is very keen to connect their network with financial capital Mumbai, there is nothing concrete as of now, claim the sources.
When asked about the development, Amar Abrol, managing director and CEO of AirAsia India, said that it was not that they did not want to come to Mumbai, but it was about when.
Kiran Jain, director - commercial, AirAsia India, when asked about the ongoing talks between the airline and Mial over slot availability, said, “I can not talk about it now.”
Though AirAsia initially remained away from the highly-congested airports of Delhi and Mumbai, the airline finally announced operations from the national capital in March 2015. The reason for starting flights from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) was that it is a comparatively less congested, and therefore, there’s more availability of slots for the airlines.
This is not the first time that AirAsia might be looking at starting services from Mumbai.
In September 2015, AirAsia’s group chief executive Tony Fernandes had announced the flight from Mumbai with a tweet, “We are coming.”
“In Incredible India... Bombay (Mumbai) is changing by the day... AIRASIA India will be starting in this metro soon,” his tweet had added with a pomp.
Talking about severe slot shortage for domestic airlines at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA), Rajeev Jain, CEO, Mial said, “We are rationing the slots, not refusing the slots.”
CSIA is among the busiest airports in the Indian sub-continent due to several constraints, the primary one being operation of just one runway at a time.
Though the airport management has through infrastructure development and better co-ordination with airline, pilots, air traffic controllers and others managed to improve the number of flight operations per day, the situation remains on the verge of crisis, claim industry experts.
The airport sees around 48 aircraft movement per hour, which the management wants to increase to around between 55-60.
According to the airline insiders, the situation becomes bad for the airlines, especially the newer entrants as the traffic feed comes primarily from metros like Delhi and Mumbai. The situation gets worse as all airlines try to take whatever available slots as might not be available in future, thereby blocking the slots further, even though they may not genuinely be needing it at point of time, the insiders said.
HIGH TRAFFIC
The airport sees around 48 aircraft movement per hour. The situation becomes bad for the airlines, especially the newer entrants as the traffic feed comes primarily from metros like Delhi and Mumbai
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