Edits, Columns & Analysis - October 2007

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Copying US model can benefit Indian carriers
P.R.Sanjai
Livemint
Oct 29, 2007
Mumbai: India’s national airlines and new regional carriers will do well to cooperate on ferrying passengers travelling from small towns to large cities or international destinations as also share engineering and ground handling resources, copying the business model in the aviation industry in the US, the world’s biggest market for airline services, say industry executives and experts.
Ten national airlines, six less than five-years old, made an estimated loss of nearly Rs2,000 crore in fiscal 2007 as seat capacity exceeded demand for air tickets. Just as the supply-demand gap seems to be easing up this fiscal year with fewer additions to fleets and robust passenger growth, aviation firms are readying to be buffeted by a set of regional airline entrants.
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Sky's the limit
Shruti Chauhan
Oct 29, 2007
Owning land, coming from a family of landlords, was not enough for this young entrepreneur. "I always aimed for the sky," laughs Manav Singh, who owns Club One Air, India's first chartered plane company which works on the concept of aircraft fractional ownership—a person can partly own an aircraft and fly it as and when he wants.
In three years, Club One Air has grown into a Rs 100-crore firm. It employs 180 people as compared to 10 in 2004. The company today boasts of flying executives of domestic biggies, including Reliance, Tata, ONGC and Indiabulls. "We function like any other full-fledged airline," says Singh, and adds: "We wanted to give corporate India its own, exclusive premier airline."
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Bumps in the PPP runway
Sunil Jain
Business Standard
Oct 29, 2007
The way things are snowballing, the privatisation of Delhi airport could soon become the ideal case study of how not to structure/run PPP initiatives. The privatisation process received flak two years ago, when the attempt to favour the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group was exposed, and now, there?s a huge furore over how the private sector firm Delhi International Airport Private Ltd (DIAL) is structuring its operations in a way that the Airports Authority of India (AAI), which was to get 46 per cent of DIAL?s revenues, will get a lot less. Equally inexplicable is the manner in which, believe it or not, the airport costs have gone up 2.7 times in a little over a year, from Rs 3,287 crore to Rs 8,900 crore. But that?s probably the subject of another column, more so since the airport regulator, which will decide just how much of this cost is due to the aeronautical needs of the airport and how much is due to the need to have more duty-free shops, is still not in place.
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Do I really look like an airline hijacker?
Dave Obee
Times Colonist, Canada
October 28, 2007
Between the security checkpoint and the departure gates at England's Heathrow airport, you will find a marvellous shopping area selling just about everything you might need or want.
And, in these security-conscious times, you can rest assured that everything sold in that mall has been deemed safe for a passenger to carry on an airplane.
I had a few minutes to kill in the mall a couple of weeks ago. Browsing in one of the shops, I stumbled across a display of orange Coca-Cola bottles. Orange Coke! A special item, available only in England! Neat. So I bought one and tossed it into my backpack.
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How Mr Goyal Built A Jet
Charles Assisi, T Surendar & Mansi Kapur
Times of India
Oct 27, 2007
Naresh Goyal is an inscrutable man. If you're not in his line of fire, being around him can be a lot of fun. He's got a great sense of humour. He laughs so often that it's impossible not to laugh with him. He's a great conversationalist with a few million stories to tell-and he tells them well. And then there is his legendary hospitality-Goyal is on first name terms with the who's who at every major city in the world. It is, therefore, easy to imagine the promoter of Jet Airways as an uncomplicated man who's done a pretty good job of creating a pretty good airline.
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`There`s a method in the dullness`
Q&A/ Bruce Ashby
Anjuli Bhargava
Business Standard
October 26, 2007
New Delhi: Indigo Airlines is one of the most efficient low-cost carriers operating in the skies today with one of the lowest costs of operation. In a market where all the players have been quite tentative with capacity addition, it is adding an aircraft every month. It has a fleet of 13 A320s today, a market share of just over 8 per cent and by the end of March, it expects to operate a total fleet of 18. It is covering 15 cities today and is moving steadily towards a breakeven. CEO Bruce Ashby spoke to Anjuli Bhargava on his carrier's strategy, the industry scenario and how going international is not always the logical or sensible extension for a domestic carrier.
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Scare in the air
Times Now.tv
October 24, 2007
Are you safe while traveling? Do you think our airports are ready for this increased traffic? By the looks of it, certainly not. In the past fifteen days, there have been three incidents raising serious doubts about air travel security in India.
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GM Rao: The man who plays to win
Soma Banerjee
Economic Times
October 15, 2007
New Delhi: It was the late 60s and Andhra Pradesh, like Orissa, West Bengal and Kerala, was grappling with Maoist forces, which is now known as the Naxalite movement. A young lad from its heartland — Rajam village in Srikakulam district — who belonged to a small trader community set out to discover the world. Thirty years later, this man is rewriting rules in the most challenging spheres of the Indian economy — infrastructure. Straddling airports, power stations, roads and realty, Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao, chairman of the GMR group, is full of more dreams, and ET’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
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One airline, four identities
Ravindra Kumar
Editor,
The Statesman
Oct 14, 2007
Were the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India to gaze at the tarmac of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport on one of these sepulchral autumn mornings, he would be utterly bewildered. He would see parked aircraft, supposedly of the same airline, wearing four different liveries – of the old Indian Airlines, of the Indian that emerged a year-and-a-half ago, of Air-India as it existed and of Air India as it is now, the latest a hybrid of the old Air-India and the new Indian liveries. And the CAG might well wonder if the Civil Aviation minister’s father-in-law runs a company that paints aircraft. Were the CAG to step on board a domestic service of this merged entity, he would get to see one air-hostess wearing an orange sari, another a blue sari with a floral motif and a third wearing a plain blue sari.
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It will hurt the aviation industry
Times of India
Oct 13, 2007

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s decision to stop issuing licences to American pilots who are above 60, even though Indian pilots are allowed to fly up to 65 years of age, is a knee-jerk reaction. While at present America does not allow pilots to fly after the age of 60 in their country, the Federal Aviation Administration has made it clear that it intends to increase the age limit soon. Considering this, the Indian regulator’s arbitrary decision will only hurt the country’s aviation industry.
Deregulation of the aviation sector helped the airline industry grow rapidly. India has the fastest-growing number of air passengers in the world. The civil aviation sector is seeing an annual growth rate of 37 per cent, and a huge latent demand for air travel is yet to be tapped.
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Go for long-term solutions
Times of India
Oct 13, 2007
The government of India’s decision not to hire superannuated pilots from abroad is to be welcomed. “If America is not allowing a pilot to fly after the age of 60 in their country, how can i give a licence to these pilots to fly in India?” asks the directorate general of civil aviation, and he is absolutely right. Safety comes first; there’s no room for compromise here. True, the projected boom in Indian aviation indicates that the number of airline passengers and services are expected to swell considerably. If this poses problems of shortfall in trained pilots, it is also throwing open a wealth of opportunity for employment and infrastructure growth. So why take the easy - and dangerous - way out?
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