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"To begin with, we are keen to have outbound flights from Bhubaneswar to the South East Asia countries.The objective of floating the EoI is to ascertain from the international carriers on the options they can offer for running international flights to and from the Bhubaneswar airport. The options can be on fare structure and frequency and timing of the proposed flights", said a state official.
He said, a couple of carriers had evinced interest to operate international flights to and from Bhubaneswar but refused to divulge their names.
Global carriers like flydubai and Air Asia had submitted schedules to run commercial operations from Bhubaneswar. While flydubai will offer connectivity from Bhubaneswar to Dubai, Air Asia will run flights between Bhubaneswar and Kuala Lumpur.
Apart from flydubai and Air Asia, Air Arabia and SilkAir have also evinced interest to start commercial operations.
Air Arabia, a low cost airline based in Sharjah (UAE) is keen to run flights between Bhubaneswar and the UAE. Air Arabia is the only publicly listed airline in the UAE, serving 15 destinations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Egypt. It also operates 154 weekly flights within the Gulf.
SilkAir, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, has proposed to run flights connecting Bhubaneswar with Singapore via Kolkata and Vishakapatnam. The operator runs scheduled passenger services from Singapore to 43 cities in Southeast Asia, South Asia, China and Australia. As the regional wing of Singapore Airlines, SilkAir serves the short haul destinations in the Singapore Airlines Group network.
Despite getting the international tag since October 2013, international flight operations are yet to take off from Bhubaneswar save Air India which routes international passengers from the city via New Delhi.
To incentivise global flight operations, the state government has announced the complete waiver of VAT (value added tax) on aviation turbine fuel (ATF).
