New airlines can’t fly to international destinations less than 6 hours from India

A new start-up domestic airline will not be allowed to operate on international routes, which are less than six hours from India.

This means that it will not be allowed to start flying between India and Bangkok or Singapore in the east or Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the west from the day it starts services.

This is the new proposal which the Civil Aviation Ministry is putting in place as a replacement of the 5/20 rule, which states that a new airline must have completed at least five years of domestic operations and have a fleet of 20 aircraft before it is eligible to apply for flying abroad.

Explaining the rationale for the new thinking, a senior Ministry official said that India does not want new airlines to make “Dubai or Singapore” their hubs.  

At the moment, new airlines Vistara and  AirAsia India are not eligible for operating international flights from India as they do not meet the currently laid down 5/20 guidelines.

GoAir has completed five years but it does not have 20 aircraft and so is also not eligible to fly international.

The latest proposal will have to be cleared by the Union Cabinet. The Ministry is hopeful of approaching the Cabinet sometime in April.

The Cabinet’s nod for changing existing guidelines is required as the Cabinet had amended the rules and brought in the 5/20 guidelines in December 2004. In many ways, this proposal takes forward what the Cabinet had decided in 2004 — only Air India and Indian Airlines will be allowed to operate between India and the Middle Eastern countries.

Then the ban on private airlines flying to the Middle East was for a period of five years but, the new proposal does not put a time line on how soon a domestic airline will be able to fly to international destinations, which are less than six hours away.

The guidelines merely propose that the minimum Domestic Flying Credits (DFCs) that a new airline must earn to be able to fly abroad is to be enhanced to 300 from 200 proposed earlier. An airline earns DFCs for each flight that it operates domestically.

It is estimated that for achieving a target of  200 DFCs an airline must have been in existence for at least a year and have a fleet of at least five-to-six Boeing 737 or Airbus 320 type of aircraft.