Yet another new player in the Indian aviation market

Looks like there's going to be one more new airline operator in India. That's right! Close on the heels of Air Asia's Indian JV with the Tatas for a low-cost carrier, and Tata's proposed JV with SQ for a full-service carrier, ABC Airways plans to set up shop in India. I came across this report in The Telegraph, about this proposed airline, which is promoted by Rajesh Ebrahim, a former commercial pilot.

Apparently, they propose to operate with 3 Embraer 170 aircraft (at least initially). Current plans include operations ex- Bangalore, Guwahati, Amritsar and Surat, and future plans include Pune and Goa. As you can see, except for Bangalore, the others are largely tier 2 cities, but with good to significant business or tourist potential. First flights are expected to start in January 2014.

This does not appear to be really in the news - there seems to be very little coverage about the proposed ABC Airways. If this is not some sort of a joke, I think it will help consolidate a good part of the air traffic across the proposed sectors, which currently have limited connectivity (with the possible exception of Goa). I'm not sure if the Embraer 170s are new, or if they've re-possessed the ones that the now-defunct Paramount Airways used to operate. Maybe it IS a new lease of life for those birds!

As an aside, the article reports a 65-70% pax load on weekdays, going up to 90%+ over weekends, for sectors involving BLR. I'm not entirely convinced these numbers are right - maybe they are for a handful of routes, but not generally for all or even most routes ex- or to- BLR.

I'm quite keen to see if ABC will get off the ground, in terms of its financials, and what effect it could have on the ever-evolving Indian aviation market.

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