Taking off to a new era

MY WORD!

Intercontinental travel was once a romantic affair. You climbed on board a swaying gangplank and sailed in a stately ocean liner that took two weeks to navigate from Great Britain to India via exotic places like Aden and the Suez Canal.

By 1970 the oceangoing ships had been mothballed and replaced by jets which conquered distance and completed the journey in a mere 12 or 13 hours "" in those days stopping in places like Beirut or Teheran.

Today a new dogfight is taking place in the travel industry. The low-cost airlines like Easyjet, Ryanair and Virgin Blue (in Australia) are taking planeloads of passengers away from established carriers like British Airways, KLM and Air France.

Will the low-cost revolution be replicated in Indian skies? It's a tough task to pull off in this highly regulated environment but it may not be impossible.

Already Deccan Air is offering cheaper fares between a string of south Indian cities. Deccan is also talking about buying planes from Airbus and mounting a serious challenge to existing carriers like Indian Airlines, Jet Airways and Air Sahara.

Others are waiting in the wings with ambitious plans of their own. Visa Air has had its blueprint ready for almost two years but it hasn't reached takeoff stage yet.

Similarly, Royal Air is still stuck in the hangar. At a slightly different level, there's Indian Airlines which has suddenly slashed fares to rockbottom levels on some sectors and put rivals like Jet in a quandary.

Where's all this heading? Other wannabe aviators are waiting for the fog of government policy to lift. The Naresh Chandra Committee on civil aviation policy has recommended that foreign airlines should be allowed to invest in India. But that's one recommendation that the Government has shown no signs of accepting till now.

But other forces are coming into play from outside the country. There is, for instance, Bangladesh's GMG Air, a low-cost airline that's now looking for permission to fly to India. There are others like it also waiting for the right signal from the Indian control tower.

Meanwhile, the aviation industry in south east Asia is poised for wrenching changes. Earlier this month, Singapore Airport announced that it would allow low-cost carriers to operate from Changi Airport.

Almost simultaneously Singapore Airlines said it would team up with European carrier RyanAir to start a new low-cost airline that will tentatively be called Tiger Air. Also, heading into the skies is Valuair, started by a handful of ex-staffers from Singapore Airlines.

Similar action is taking place in other parts of Asia. AirAsia, the most successful low-cost airline in the region has just started operations in Thailand (it's called Thai AirAsia).

Obviously, the Thais aren't about to take this lying down and have already announced the start of Nok Air, partly owned by Thai Airways. Another low-cost operator 1-2-Go is already in the air.

What impact will these developments have on the Indian scenario? The answer is that India has just opened its skies to south east Asian and Sri Lankan carriers.

At the same time carriers like Jet Airways and Air Sahara have started flying to Colombo. It's only a matter of time before the south east Asian carriers open out their navigation charts and start looking at Indian skies.

What will be the impact of these new airlines across Asian skies? Will they shoot the older, costlier airlines out of the sky? Or, will they, as some aviation industry experts are predicting, have the effect of spreading the airline revolution to smaller towns than ever before. Says one aviation expert: "Low-cost airlines will lower the income threshold for air travel, opening totally new markets."

It's now possible, for instance, to fly from parts of Thailand to Kampuchea for around Rs 1,000 and some Indian tourists have already made the journey.

The Government's efforts to open the aviation sector have, so far, been a highly confused affair. But, as pressures from all around increase, it's a safe bet that Indian aviation is about to fly into uncharted and exciting skies.