Jet Airways to add 7 new aircraft this fiscal, fly new routes

With air traffic growing at a healthy pace, Indian carriers are once again looking to add capacities. Jet Airways, India’s biggest airline, plans to acquire 6-7 new narrow body aircraft this fiscal.
These aircraft would be deployed on domestic and select international routes in such a way that the domestic leg is completed during day time and international destinations (nearby countries) can be serviced at night.

In the next three years the airline plans to add as many as 24 aircraft but some of these additions would be through replacements under sale and leaseback. Airline officials said that the 6-7 narrow bodies for this year would be completely new additions. With new aircraft coming in, can new destinations be far behind? Jet has already received traffic rights for a daily service between Mumbai and Manila in the Philippines and is expected to launch this during the upcoming winter schedule. Besides, a daily Delhi-Amsterdam service is also on the agenda from this winter.

Officials said the Manila flight will also offer enhanced connectivity to Gulf countries and so Jet plans to simultaneously increase frequencies of its flights to the Gulf region, too.

“There are no new flights to either Europe or North America for now. But the Manila daily service will provide good connectivity to Gulf passengers. We plan to add 2-3 flights daily to the Gulf region this winter, where we already do 12-15 flights a day,” officials said.

Meanwhile, the airline has already begun daily flights to Milan from Delhi and is expected to soon receive permission to get into code-share agreements with Italian carrier Alitalia to use the latter’s network for providing onward connections to other European cities and to North America. Once this permission is through, Jet is expected to begin a daily service to Rome, too.
Jet’s international expansion comes just when competitors such as Kingfisher Airlines and low-cost carrier IndiGo are gearing up to fly to more overseas destinations.

Kingfisher and IndiGo have recently been permitted to launch flights to Colombo from destinations other than Chennai; and IndiGo has been awarded permission to go to Singapore — a route on which full service carriers, Air India, Jet Airways and Kingfisher, are already operational. But while all other Indian carriers are clamouring to service destinations to Southeast Asia and the Gulf, Jet is keen to consolidate its hold on European and North American routes.