Air travel will now become a little expensive as the government has decided to increase the lower limit on airfares by five per cent amid rising aviation turbine fuel (ATF) prices, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Friday. The upper limit on airfares will remain as it is for now. Just a month back, the Centre had increased the lower and upper limits on domestic airfares by 10-30 per cent due to rising ATF prices. While announcing resumption of scheduled domestic flights in May last year, the aviation ministry had placed limits on airfares through seven bands classified on the basis of flight duration.
This instruction is a temporary measure and shall be in force till March 31 and will be reviewed subsequently.
Presenting the Budget for 2020-21, Sitharaman said Rs 1.7 lakh crore has been provided for transport infrastructure in 2020-21.
Lufthansa is a founder member of Star Alliance and was the mentor airline for facilitating Air India's entry.
A coordination committee shall monitor the start up clearances to manage and prioritise the movement of flights during fog.
To meet the needs of the increasing air traffic in the country, the Civil Aviation Ministry will talk to state governments to develop a 'national grid' for aviation by re-activating 400-odd airfields lying disused in parts of the country.
The government has also introduced procedures for consideration and approval of applications and have set times lines for various stages of processing
The two parties have been in talks for a month and a half.
'While we do some metro-to-metro flying, we have got a lot of metro-to-non-metro cities like Bengaluru-Visakhapatnam, Bengaluru-Bhubaneswar, Bengaluru-Guwahati and Bengaluru-Kochi.'
The Central and state governments must take a long-term, pragmatic view and 'plan big' to ensure a future capacity of at least a 100-million passengers at Mumbai's new airport, which is the norm for all major airports in the world, including the one at Delhi, said a report titled 'Second Airport: What Mumbai Must Learn from International Experience,' carried out by the Observer Research Foundation.
The government proposes to divest 76 per cent of Air India, along with its shareholding in Air India Express and its ground-handling subsidiary, AISATS.
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