Cheap flights to take off from 43 new cities soon

As many as 43 unserved airports in the country are expected to be thrown open to commercial flights from next month in a phased manner, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha said on Thursday.

He disclosed that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) had received 43 initial proposals from 11 bidders for 190 routes under the regional air connectivity scheme UDAN.

The government's ambitious UDAN (Ude Desh Ke Aam Naagrik) scheme, under which fares have been capped at Rs 2,500 for a one-hour flight , aims at boosting air connectivity to and from these small airports in regional cities and towns and making flying more affordable.

Sinha said based on the first phase of bidding for airports, the UDAN scheme is going to be a game changer, as it will increase the total number of operational airports in the country to 118 from 75 at present.

He said the government hopes to have the first flight under UDAN in February as several airports like in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and Cooch Behar in West Bengal are ready to go. The bids for the routes would be finalised by February 3, he said.

In all, 55 airports, which have either no operations or limited operations, would have regular flights now, Sinha said.

"We believe the first regional flight can take off some time in February itself because there are 12 underserved airports as well. These airports have flight service and will only be adding flights to them," he said.

Airports such as Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jalgaon and Cooch Behar, and Pant Nagar are some of the airports which are ready to go now and just need operators to launch flights, Sinha said. "We will expect that these airports start getting utilised almost immediately as soon as the operator is there," he added.

Sinha, however, declined to give details of the bidders, saying, we are inviting counter bids at this stage and once the counter bids come, the bidders may change, the routes may change as well.

This is just the first round and as other rounds are in progress we will massively expand our aviation network, he said it's also a great outcome for the large national airlines as they would have more traffic coming into important hub airports.

According to the Civil Aviation Ministry, Maharashtra has the highest number of unserved airports at 19, followed by Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh at 11 each. Similarly, West Bengal and Karnataka have seven such airports each which do not have one single flight operations.The routes will be awarded to bidders who quote the lowest Viability Gap Funding (VGF) requirement.

Under UDAN, the participating airlines would be extended VGF -- that would be jointly funded by the Centre and the state government concerned. The government has already started charging Rs 8,500 levy per departure of flights on major routes to finance the VGF. However, airlines have challenged the charging of the levy in court.

He said the Government has already received some of the funds in the RCS and that Government is expecting cooperation from other airlines to participate in that.