Fly India Fly

Fri 17 Jun 2005, 1115 am

Picked up the morning newspaper and went to the one place where no one else can come and interfere and lemme read in peace! I am king and the owner of the newspaper for the next 10 mins!

As usual glanced through the headlines, city news etc etc and moved to the biz section. For a second I thought I had mistakenly picked up yesterdays newspaper. Once again the top story was an Indian airliner stealing the show at the Paris Air Show.

This was indeed fresh news. Another Indian airline placed an order worth 6 bn USD for new aircrafts at the show! I had not even heard of the airline before – Indigo!!!!! All I knew was that Indigo was a car!!!

Indigo is another low cost airline which all of a sudden has made waves in this country after Air Deccan, SpiceJet and apex fares from the others. And with an order which is almost 6 times the turnover of Infosys, India’s aviation sector seems to be finally taking off. Good job Praful Patel!

India has about 200 jets as of now and has placed orders for another 150. This, compared to 6000 in the US!!!!! The gap is too huge but the rate at which this sector is growing its just a matter of time.

This also means huge employment opportunities in the country from pilots to air hostesses to ground staff. There is soon going to be a plethora of jobs and half to full page Times Ascent ads like the ones KF Airlines posted some time back.

Institutes like Frankfinn will spring up in every nook and corner of the country just like IT training institutes did when the software bug bit the nation.

All in the entire picture seems good, based of course on the assumption that the airlines have a sound revenue model backing them. Its surely not going to be easy recovering costs selling tickets at 50% discount etc.

For now, Indian Railways, you have competition.

And then the biggest doubt as my 87 year old granny raised when I was discussing all this with her, “Beta, do these guys know how to take off and land an airplane?”. I said, “I sincerely hope so!”

-S