Jet gets permission for Gulf flights

The government today opened up the lucrative Gulf route to domestic private airlines with the Naresh Goyal-promoted Jet Airways becoming the first to get the nod to fly to the region from January 1 next year.

Only Air India and Indian (now merged to form Air India) were allowed to operate on the Middle East and the Gulf route.

As per the decision of the government, scheduled Indian private airlines were not permitted to operate international flights to and from Gulf till the end of 2007. The Gulf routes were served only by the Indian public carriers till then, an official statement said.

Jet Airways was granted traffic rights on the Gulf and Middle East routes at a meeting of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation last evening, it said.

Jet has been permitted to carry 3,682 passengers to Kuwait per week from three destinations in India. Of the 3,682 seats, 1,582 would be from the Delhi-Kuwait route while an equal 1,050 on Trivandrum-Kuwait and Kochi-Kuwait routes, the statement said.

Jet can also fly 3,150 passengers to Oman per week on three routes - Kochi-Muscat, Trivandrum-Muscat and Calicut-Muscat.

The airline has been given permission to connect Calicut and Mumbai to Qatar's capital city Doha where it can carry a maximum of 2,100 passengers per week.