Union Minister for Civil Aviation Ashok Gajapathi Raju on Saturday asked the State governments, including Tamil Nadu, to rationalise taxes on Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) so as to energise the aviation industry. Stating that he had written letters to the Chief Ministers of States and Union Territories on slashing the Value Added Tax on ATF, he said that jet fuel accounted for most part of operat...
Vistara, India’s fastest growing full service carrier, has successfully completed its first year of operations on January 9, 2016. In a short span of one year, the airline boasts a fleet size of nine brand new A320 aircraft, operating 307 weekly flights to 12 destinations across the country. Vistara has already flown more than one million happy customers within one year of operations which r...
Mehair (MW, Mumbai Int'l) has signed a contract with the government of Goa to provide helicopter and seaplane services to remote locations within the western Indian state. The contract, which comes into being from January 6, will see Mehair deploying its seaplanes on scheduled flights to tourist locales on the Mandovi and Chapora rivers. This will be followed by helicopter operations on Jan...
Jet Airways India Ltd, Etihad Airways PJSC’s partner, paced a rally in Indian airline stocks after the region’s costliest fuel prices were cut to the lowest in five years. Jet Airways, majority owned by Naresh Goyal, climbed 8.2 per cent to its highest since January 2011, making it the best performing share on the Bloomberg Intelligence Global Airlines Valuation Peers Index in the p...
Any way you look at it, taking a domestic flight at the turn of the century was a remarkable event in the life of an average Indian. One had to plan much in advance, air tickets were an expensive proposition and though private airlines had arrived on the scene, Air India continued to have a substantial hold over the domestic aviation market. How things have changed in the last decade-and-a-half...
Indian low-cost carrier IndiGo has taken delivery of its 100thAirbus A320 aircraft. The company celebrated the event with a ceremony at New DelhiInternational Airport, says IndiGo in a statement. The aircraft bears registration VT-IDR. Flightglobal’s Fleet Analyzer shows that IndiGo’s fleet of 100 A320s has an average age of just 3.6 years. It has...
Some foreign carriers pitch for more landing points as well as higher number of seats but at times allowing such requests could hurt domestic carriers, said a senior official from the Civil Aviation Ministry. Signalling a major shift in granting air traffic rights, the government is looking at restricting the number of landing points for overseas airlines irrespective of their seat entitlements...
A proposal for a dedicated civil aviation security force to look after security affairs of the airports has been dismissed by a Parliamentary Standing Committee, but it has strongly suggested an aviation security policy for ensuring fool-proof security at airports. Arguing against a dedicated security force, it said multiple agencies were already engaged in airport security and were playing a s...
India and Russia took forward a project to jointly manufacture military choppers under the 'Make in India' initiative even as other plans, including one to construct frigates, took a backseat during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Moscow. Among the 16 agreements inked during the visit, the only one on defence cooperation - a significant facet of the bilateral relation - refe...
A light aircraft has crashed on take-off near the airport in the Indian capital, Delhi, killing 10 people. The Beechcraft King Air plane chartered by India's Border Security Force (BSF) came down after hitting a wall in Dwarka district and burst into flames. The plane was carrying members of the border patrol force, officials said. In May 2011, 10 people died after a small medical amb...
IndiGo, India's largest airline by passengers carried, said the delivery of the first fuel-efficient Airbus A320neo has been delayed and there could be additional delays, citing "industrial reasons" at European plane maker Airbus SAS. "On 17 December 2015 after close of business hours, we have received an official notification from Airbus that the A320neo aircraft, the...
The tragic incident at Mumbai airport, where a technician of Air India airlines was killed after he was sucked into a plane engine, has raised serious questions on the safety of runway operations at the Indian airports. As per civil aviation rules, a runway should be completely free from any kind of obstruction at the time of landing or take off. Many of the around 100 passengers who were on th...