American Airlines spreads wings in South Asia

American Airlines (AA), like other big US carriers, is concentrating on expanding its international routes, particularly to the booming air markets of India and China.

According to AA's senior vice-president of planning, Henry Joyner, American Airlines has been looking at the Indian market for quite some time. The signing of the open skies agreement between the US and India in April this year gave AA an opportunity to start its Indian operations.

AA, the world's largest airline with a fleet of about 1,000 planes and operations to over 40 countries, launched a daily nonstop Chicago O' Hare-to-Delhi service last month. It has scheduled to commence its operations to Shanghai in China in April 2006.

For its Indian operations, AA has a code share contract with Air Sahara so that its customers can use the latter's network to reach Delhi and then fly onwards to Chicago.

"Our agreements with Air Sahara will broaden American's network in South Asia," Joyner told a team of visiting journalists from India at the AA's headquarters at Dallas Fort Worth.

AA's executive vice-president of marketing, Dan Garton, said that Chicago-Delhi had a high load factor with America having a large community of Indian expatriates who travel back and forth frequently.

Besides, most of AA's major corporate clients, including IBM, Dell, Microsoft and Intel, have people regularly going to India.

Chicago alone is stated to be having an Indian-American population of 1.14 lakh. There are 9,750 Indian-owned companies in the area with a total sales of $3.7 billion. These companies payroll of 735 million is the largest of any ethnic group in Chicago.

With assistance from AA's 150-strong Indian Employee Resource Group, Garton said, AA had structured a special menu for its Delhi flights. The menu features Indian and Indian-inspired vegetarian and western meals. No beef or pork is served on these flights

About starting nonstop flights to other destinations in India, Garton said that such a possibility would be examined a couple of years later.

AA's managing director of passenger sales, Thomas P Aichele, said AA got the approval for starting its Delhi operations in July and the flight was launched within four months. "This is one of the shortest period that AA started a flight to a new international destination," he said.

Incidentally, the 16-hour Chicago-Delhi flight is the longest nonstop flight ever operated by AA. The long-duration has also forced AA to stretch the scheduled duty time of pilots from 18 hours to 20 hours.

The airline had also agreed to staff the flight with two pairs of pilots. One pair would sit in the first class while the other flies the plane. They will switch midway through the flight.

AA sales manager, Raj Sidhu, said that there had been a demand from the large Indian community in the states of Illinois, Michigan and Mississippi for a direct flight to Delhi. According to Aichele, there was also a flow of traffic from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.