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`No plans of coming back in foreseeable future'

Ashwini Phadnis

NEW DELHI, Sept. 17

THE US carrier, United Airlines (UA), has no plans of coming back to India in the foreseeable future. ``We have no plans of coming back to India in the foreseeable future,'' the General Manager (India), Mr Michael J. Purchon, told Business line.

The airline official refused to be drawn into putting any specific time-frame in which the airline could even consider restarting operations to India. Incidentally, this is the second time that the airline is withdrawing services from India.

However, despite the withdrawal, it will continue to have a presence in India through its general sales agents, Interglobe.

On the question of what is to happen to the staff which UA had employed and whether they would be provided with a golden handshake, Mr Purchon just said, ``I cannot say anything about the staff just yet.''

When asked whether it was problems of over-flying Afghanistan, which the now-postponed Delhi-Chicago non-stop flight was facing, was in anyway responsible for the decision, Mr Purchon merely said, ``I cannot speak on the Chicago flight.''

However, senior UA officials had earlier told Business Line that they were excited about the Delhi-Chicago non-stop service for a variety of reasons including the fact that the US Government had recently allowed US carriers to over-fly Afghanistan after a gap of several years.

The decision about over-flying Afghanistan was crucial for the airline as, senior UA officials admitted as much, the flight path over Afghanistan helped clip several minutes off the flight time, a boon when undertaking a long flight.

But the events on black Tuesday in the US changed all that. Afghanistan was again considered unsafe as the primary suspect behind the attacks on the US, Osama bin Laden, was said to be seeking shelter there. And with one of the closest allies of the US, Britain, announcing suspension of British Airways flights to Pakistan as they had to over-fly Afghanistan, it was probably a question of time before the US also decided it was in their best interest not to operate over Afghanistan just yet.

Analysts may argue that the US airline could have chosen another route and operated the flight. But in the present environment where UA is cutting capacity and services in order to respond to the new business and security environment following the attack , one is not sure how much sense it would have made to launch a new service.

The decision to withdraw from India, at least on the face of it, seem to have been dictated by market demands. Having decided that being a US carrier, its core competency was in offering the Indian market a better way to travel to the US, the airline pro posed launching the daily Delhi-Chicago flight and withdrawing the services to London and Hong Kong. But with the proposed launch in possible trouble, it probably made more sense to consolidate than expand at the present moment.

Pic.: Mr Michael J.Purchon, General Manager(India), United Airlines.