After the Gulf carriers, South-East Asian airlines are also looking to increase bilateral air traffic rights in the wake of the Civil Aviation Ministry’s proposal to enhance air capacity between India and Abu Dhabi to 53,000 seats a week following the Jet-Etihad deal.

While Emirates and Qatar Airways have expressed their keenness on revising air capacity into India, Malaysia Airlines, too, said that their demand for increase of bilateral air traffic rights was pending for the past one year.

“We have used up all our bilateral seats. In fact, we have been asking to increase air capacity to India from the past one year,” Germal Singh Khera, Head, Government and International Affairs, Malaysia Airlines, told Business Line on the sidelines of the 69th annual general meeting of the IATA (International Air Transport Association) held in Cape Town recently.

The South-East Asian airline had increased its flight frequency to Mumbai and Delhi recently and will be focusing on the main metro cities of India. “We would like to have double daily flights from the metro cities of India,” Khera said. While he said that the airline is open to investing in Indian carriers, but “nothing specific” is in the pipeline.

Policy blockade

Speaking about the largest civilian aircraft Airbus A380, Khera said that India is an attractive market to operate the aircraft, especially the Delhi and Mumbai sectors. “Unfortunately, the Indian government is not allowing it operate in the Indian skies,” he added.

There are also a host of other international airlines keen to get the A380 into India. These include Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa and Emirates, except that they do not know when the Indian Government will allow that.

Emirates is also seeking increase in bilateral air traffic rights “We asked for more seats four years ago. Irrespective of what happened with Jet and Etihad, our request predates theirs. With all our flights being full, we tried to bring the A-380. But the Indian Government didn’t allow it. We had to work within the seats allocated to us on the basis of frequencies. We have asked them for some more,” Emirates President Tim Clark told Business Line recently.

Civil Aviation Ministry had recently said that the Ministry will be evaluating India’s international passenger growth and also indicated that it will also see how the existing bilateral rights were being used by Emirates before taking a call on their request.

Emirates, which currently operates 54,200 seats a week to India, has been demanding to increase its bilateral rights to 80,000 a week.

Qatar Airways, too, had been requesting to revise its seat capacity to about 72,000 a week from the current capacity of 24,000.

nivedita.ganguly@thehindu.co.in

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