 "India might raise Dubai airline seat entitlements")
According to a senior official of the aviation ministry the governing body of aviation activities in the Gulf state has written to the ministry that there is a further requirement to increase the number of seats, as carriers from Dubai are not being able to expand operations in India, for lack of flying rights. Dubai has utilised all its allocation.
The official said the government was inclined to allow more seats, as Indian carriers were on the verge of utilising their quota; they’d utilised 98 per cent by end-June. It had turned down a similar request six months earlier; at the time, our carriers had not been able to utilise their allocation.
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The designated carriers of the two countries are currently entitled to utilise a total of 65,200 seats, by the agreement signed between India and the UAE (Dubai) in February 2014.
The move would benefit Dubai-based Emirates airline, which had earlier said it wanted to increase its network here. “We have 10 cities in India are are trying to expand as much as we can. With the limited seat capacity, we are very much restricted today to these ten points. If the bilateral agreement goes through, we can gain seats and we can cover most of the points in India. Our objective is to cover as much as we can,” Ahmed Khoory, its senior vice-president, commercial operations, West Asia and Indian Ocean, had said in March. Emirates did not respond to a detailed query on its expansion plan at the time of going to press.
Dubai went from allocation of 10,400 seats a week to India in 2003-04 and only six cities to 54,200 seats a week and 14 cities by 2008-09 during then civil aviation minister Praful Patel’s tenure.
After which, in a 2011 report, the Union comptroller and auditor general had rapped the aviation ministry for not protecting government-owned Air India’s interests.