In anticipation that the North East (NE) is likely to become a major business hub following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s keen interest in the seven-sister States of India, national carrier Air India (AI) is all set to expand its wings in the region. It will increase the services of its existing and new flights within the region, and even to the neighbouring countries.
For this, it will make its NE base in Guwahati and upgrade the facility for bigger aircrafts. Till now, the carrier used to operate NE services based from Kolkata.
“DoNER is ensuring that the Centre gives adequate attention to states in the region which are not well connected with other parts of the country via air.
The bottlenecks in providing air connectivity to some of the States of the region have been cleared. Air India is now all set to restart, expand and increase frequencies by use of even better aircrafts like ATR 72s and A-320 in the sector,” said a top AI official.
Besides the ATR operations, Air India has also been operating flights in the region with its Airbus family aircraft between Kolkata and Silchar, Dimapur, Dibrugarh, Aizawl, Imphal, Agartala and Guwahati, apart from Delhi- Guwahati routes and then connecting the NE to Dhaka, Kathmandu and Yangon.
With increase in tourism from the region, Kolkata will be connected to Bangkok during the summer and commercial capital Mumbai will also get a direct flight service from Guwahati. A new Ahmedabad- Kolkata service will also be introduced.
Alliance Air, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Air India, has already signed an MoU with the NEC for flight operations under Viability Gap Funding (VGF). Besides Guwahati, Shillong, Tezpur, lilabari, Silchar, Agartala, Imphal, Dimapur, Dibrugarh, which are connected with ATR 42 types, will be upgraded by ATR 72s soon and Air Bus.
During the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime, Alliance Air started its operations to the North East in January 2003 and discontinued in January 2013 due to outstanding VGF. Thereafter several glitches cropped upon curtailing the flight services and most of the routes were either discontinued or irregular.