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India's common man
flies
by Raja M
MUMBAI - The early-morning
Air Deccan flight DN 613 from Mumbai to Chennai
could have been a glimpse fifteen years into the
future, with a mere six flights scheduled in only
two hours, from 5 to 7 AM, at a nearly empty
Indian metropolitan airport. From what Captain G R
Gopinath, managing director of Air Deccan, told
Asia Times Online later in the day, India's flight
 schedule per hour
could run into hundreds in the near future,
carrying millions of domestic passengers.
Projecting an astounding target of a billion seats
a year within the next two decades, Gopinath
seriously talks of 50,000 daily flights, a
dizzying jump from the current 600 flights that
India's domestic airlines manage a day.
Low-cost flying couldn't get lower, and
the civil aviation industry's ambitions higher. In
early May, Air Deccan announced that it would sell
air tickets at 1 rupee per ticket (2 US cents) on
its metro routes, with the mandatory $5 airport
tax. However, only four seats would be offered at
this incredible price on every Air Deccan Airbus
320 flight on a first-come, first-served basis,
with the rest divided into different budget rates.
"In India, maids carry mobile phones these
days, [something that was] unthinkable a few years
ago," Gopinath said. He now aims to empower her to
fly. Demolishing the outdated snob value attached
to flying, Air Deccan has thus not only added a
spring to the steps of budget airlines in India,
it is also engineering a social revolution where
flying will be as routine as taking a train.
English-language daily The Hindu estimates the
Indian domestic aviation market to be 19 million
passengers annually, and expected to reach 45-50
million by 2010. Five million passengers will be
added yearly for the next five years, numbers
whose implications obviously have not yet
penetrated deep enough into aviation and
industrial circles.
Thirty low-cost
airlines operate across Asia. India expects to see
about two dozen cost-effective air services,
including Spicejet, Kingfisher, Air India Express,
Yamuna Airways, Magic Air, Paramount Airways, Air
One, Indus Air and Go Air. India's common man
holds the key to this phenomenal growth. As
consumer goods majors realized early in India, low
prices and vast volumes are the key to success in
the middle-class-driven Indian market.
So
the Bangalore-based Air Deccan struck a deal
earlier this month with R K Laxman, India's most
famous cartoonist, to use his legendary "Common
Man" character as Air Deccan's mascot. Laxman's
"Common Man" is a silent middle-aged man wearing a
tucked-up dhoti, an ancient checked coat and a
befuddled expression, observing India's colorful
chaos for five decades. He has been appearing in
Laxman's "You Said It" daily cartoon since early
1950s. Laxman told Air Deccan that if his "Common
Man" mascot is indeed used, then tickets must sell
at 1 rupee, possibly the cheapest air ticket
anywhere in the world. Ten years ago, Laxman told
this correspondent in an interview that once when
he put his "Common Man" inside an aircraft,
readers howled in protest: "How could the 'Common
Man' afford to fly?" Laxman had to explain to
indignant readers that the "Common Man" had won an
air ticket in a contest. A decade later, not only
can the "Common Man" afford to buy an air ticket,
he also gets to be the official mascot of a
fast-growing airline.
India and China have
agreed to double the number of flights between the
two countries, to 28 flights a day this winter and
42 by next summer. These two Asian nations, which
together have over 2.4 billion people, are now the
fastest-growing aviation markets worldwide. Air
India's recent controversial $7 billion deal with
Boeing only indicates the extent to which stakes
have shot up in this regional market. With the
government and the private sector investing $20
billion over the next five years, passenger
traffic is set to grow 20% annually, Indian
aviation minister and self-made millionaire Praful
Patel told the media recently.
India's
present average annual air travel is 0.1 trips per
person, a fraction of the global average of 2.
Only last year, the Sydney-based consultancy
Center for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) found that
the Chinese took only 0.13 flights per capita in
2003, lagging behind Malaysia (0.60), Thailand
(0.25), the Philippines (0.19) and Indonesia
(0.15). Now, in a market outlook for China, Boeing
forecasts a "requirement" in China for nearly
2,400 new jet airplanes worth $197 billion over
the next 20 years. "By 2022," Boeing expects,
"Chinese carriers will be flying more than 2,850
passenger and cargo airplanes, making China's
fleet the largest outside of the United States."
In the Indian domestic sector, Air Deccan
expects to earn $230.8 million in the current
fiscal year. Gopinath told ATol that if most of
India's 250 million middle class can be made to
fly four times a year, India would reach its one
billion seats figure. He enjoys recounting this
story: "Recently, a young passenger thanked me and
called me the Narayanamoorthy [the founder of
software giant Infosys] of Indian aviation. I
asked him where he worked. He said, 'Infosys'."
All that is fine. But the big question is
how India's airport infrastructure, which
currently lags far behind the frenetic growth of
the country's mushrooming airlines, will cope. Key
airports and air traffic control staff in
metropolitan areas like New Delhi and Mumbai are
already choked beyond safe capacity, but airport
unions adamantly oppose privatization. The
pressure for change, though, is relentlessly
building up. In the two years after it took off,
with a disaster of an inaugural flight that saw
the plane's engines spewing smoke and an emergency
evacuation, Air Deccan has sold over a million
seats. An average of 30% of the passengers on its
flights are first-time fliers. This correspondent
saw an unusually large proportion of children and
elderly people on flight DN 613, suggesting that
entire middle class families can now afford to fly
instead of taking the train.
This
correspondent also found the budget airline flying
experience more comfortable and pleasant than
expected. Some have complained that the airline
charges for refreshments, but Air Deccan's young
flight crew, selling coffee and tea (25 cents),
vegetable rolls (75 cents) and samosas (30 cents
apiece), looked more presentable and cheerful than
the government-owned Indian Airlines or Air India
crew serving "free" airline meals and welcome
drinks. Also, domestic routes in India never take
more than 150 minutes. So, as an Air Deccan
in-flight magazine asks: "Who wants to eat while
flying anyway?"
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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