Aircraft of the low-fare carrier GoAir began touching down and taking off from the GMR Hyderabad International Airport from the early hours of Thursday, making the City of Pearls its 23rd destination across India.
The new schedule makes for daily non-stop flights connecting Hyderabad to Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Also, tourists seeking to go through the Port Blair experience will be connected via Bangalore, said the airline’s Chief Executive Officer Wolfgang Prock-Schauer, after a traditional ceremony at the airport marking the new flight service.
Interacting with presspersons later, he said the airline would be adding six more aircraft — one a month — by the end of the fiscal, taking its fleet strength up from 22, to 28 by March, 2017. Consequently, they were looking to increase number of flights from 144 to 184 daily by this December itself.
Fly international
Significantly, Mr. Wolfgang also said depending upon how things turn out, GoAir would go international by 2017 summer. Fielding a question, he said the 5/20 rule that Government of India mandated till recently, was a good one. “It has a reason behind it, we agree,” he stated. The stipulation says an airline should have five years of flying operations and 20 aircraft, for it to get permission for international operations. However, when the Union Cabinet cleared the Civil Aviation policy in June this year, it replaced the 5/20 condition doing away with the five year operations part while maintaining that an airline should have 20 aircraft in its fleet to fly on international routes.
Maintenance
Fielding a question about aircraft, Mr. Wolfgang having a fleet with similar aircraft — in GoAir’s case it is Airbus A 320s (186-seater) and A 320 Neos — made for easier maintenance schedules. “We are not looking for other aircraft and differential seating capacity because we are pleased with our current plane-load factor,” he said.
He went onto clarify that GoAir as of now did not have any exclusive tie-up with GMR that has an MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) facility here. “We do have a lot of our aircraft maintenance done at GMR MRO, but use other MROs too,” he said.
GoAir schedules can accessed online atwww.GoAir.inor online travel portals, through its call centre, ticketing offices and its mobile app available across Apple iOS and Google Android.
