Air Deccan campaign from Sep 19 for No 1 slot

Bangalore, Sept 16: India's first low cost carrier, Air Deccan will trigger a massive campaign from September 19 to dislodge Jet Airways from the number one slot.

Announcing the campaign named 'WOW'', Air Deccan Managing Director Capt G R Gopinath and Chief Operating Officer Warwick Brady told newsmen here that from September 19 the airline would also offer a free ticket to its passengers if the flight is delayed beyond three hours, except in cases where delay is caused by fog.

For a cancelled flight, Air deccan would put its passengers on the next flight, on another airline, subject to availability.

With a fleet of 37 aircrafts, including 12 Airbus A 320s, Air Deccan currently enjoy a market share of 21.2 per cent being the second behind the Jet Airways which had a clear ten per cent lead.

Growing at a rate of 0.5 per cent a month, Air Deccan aims to capture the slot of being the best carrier with customer satisfaction by January next year Capt Gopinath said ''its inevitability and reality'' that they will emerge number one carrier in the country, despite the hurdles posed by competition and bureaucracy.

Mr Brady said by the end of the current fiscal year, the airliner would have 45 aircraft and by fiscal 2008 the number would go up to 57. Capt Gopinath said in October three Airbus aircraft and two ATRs would join the fleet.

Capt Gopinath remarked ''before we become number one, we will become the best airliner with ontime performance. The low cost carrier had added 20 new airports in its national map so far this year and by the end of the current fiscal the total flights per day would touch 310 from the present 270, Mr Brady said. The new destinations that would unfurl over the next couple of months include Bellary, Kullu, Pathankot, Jamshedpur and Kutch.

By the end of current fiscal year the airliner would have carried seven million passengers from two million passengers last year.

Mr Brady said that Air Deccan had recently signed up with Lufthansa for component support. Simiarly it had also signed up a support package with Airbus for three million dollars and ATR for two million dollars. This would ensure 45 engineers of both the aviation majors to be housed in Air Deccan bases to provide in house training to technical staff. Effort also would be made to have one A320 aircraft and three ATRs as spare aircraft to reduce or minimise cancellations. Mr Brady said.

Both Mr Brady and Capt Gopinath highlighted the bureaucratic bottlenecks and predatory pricing indulged by the competition to kill the low cost airliner. Capt Gopinath said ''we are not going to give up''. He lamented that the airliner was still to get parking bays in New Delhi, even though a relatively later comer, SpiceJet had been given five bays in New Delhi.

Stating that cartalisation and monopoly was playing havoc on the economy, Capt Gopinath wanted setting up of multiple airports in the country.

UNI