State-run City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) plans to issue a request for qualification (RFQ) for the Navi Mumbai international airport in the middle of next month.
Pant, a 1991-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of Rajasthan cadre, is currently secretary in the ministry of ports, shipping and waterways.
B C Khanduri, who was elevated to Cabinet rank in the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, who was given independent charge of the civil aviation ministry, were among those who joined work on Monday.
Airline systems across airports, which were impacted due to a global IT outage on Friday, have started working normally, and all issues are likely to be resolved by noon on Saturday, Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu said. The ministry is constantly monitoring the operations at airports and airlines to ensure travel readjustments and refunds are taken care of, he added.
The government on Tuesday restored the payment of productivity-linked incentives (PLI) to Air India's functional directors, five months after stopping it. With losses mounting, the Air India Board had approved a cut of up to 50 per cent in the monthly PLI for the airline's executive directors and other functional directors in September last year, as part of cost-cutting measures.
Private carrier Kingfisher Airlines hopes to fly to international destinations by mid 2007, once it receives delivery of Airbus A-330 wide-bodied aircraft.
The presence of an engine maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) facility in India could have prevented Go First airline from going "belly up", as sending engines abroad for servicing is not an efficient way to operate a carrier, Piyush Srivastava, senior economic advisor, Ministry of Civil Aviation, said in a statement on Tuesday. On May 3, Go First suspended its flights and filed for insolvency, squarely blaming engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney (PW) for its cash crunch. The airline claimed that about half of its 54 aircraft were grounded on May 3 due to a delay in the supply of engines by the US-based company. PW has denied the charges.
Government has postponed by a month a decision to privatise four of the countrys biggest airports pending more inter-ministry consultations, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Friday.
Price appreciation since the aircraft order in 2005 could yield Rs 7,200-crore gain.
Cabinet approval for greenfield airports within the 150 km radius of an existing airport is being done away with, according to the new greenfield airports policy, which has recently been sent for Cabinet consideration by the civil aviation ministry. This would have serious implications for airports in large metro cities including Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai, where a second airport will eventually be a reality.
Days after exchange of words between the Planning Commission and the Civil Aviation Ministry, the process of Kolkata airport modernisation is all set to start with the Public Investment Board meeting in New Delhi later this week to give its nod to the Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion) project .
Jet has pulled out flights from Northeast states and also cancelled its Srinagar flight, leading to reduction in capacity.
The plan, vetted by the finance and civil aviation ministries, is likely to include proposals relating to the nature of financial assistance it wants from the government, including equity infusion and soft loan.
To meet the exigencies on highways, the civil aviation ministry has suggested to the surface transport ministry to earmark space for helipads every 100 kilometres on major national highways.
It is for the first time in the history of Independent India that not a single Muslim is part of the Union Cabinet.
Worried over security of VIPs and movement of money in poll-bound Bihar, the Election Commission has written to Civil Aviation Ministry to deploy trained security personnel and baggage scanners at the unguarded state hangar in Patna.
The international airport will initially focus on cargo exports as the passenger needs would be extensively served by the upcoming international airport near Panvel in Navi Mumbai, which is just 90 minutes' drive from Pune. The Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation has issued a notice to begin the land acquisition procedure.
The sources said the aircraft was allotted a remote bay C-33 instead of a Contact Stand, an aircraft parking stand that is suitable for walking passengers to and from an aircraft from an allocated boarding gate. This further added to passenger woes and deprived them the opportunity to avail basic facilities like rest rooms and refreshments at the terminal, they added.
The government has cleared the acquisition of 46 new aircraft worth over Rs 19,000 crore (Rs 190 billion) by three low-cost carriers: SpiceJet, IndiGo and Jet Lite.
Deploying additional Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel, providing real-time updates through social media, adding more immigration counters and ensuring 100 per cent manning of immigration counters - these are some of the steps that the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) is now taking in coordination with other stakeholders to avoid congestion at major airports during the upcoming festival season. During the last year's festival and winter season, major airports in the country suffered from congestion due to lack of sufficient airport infrastructure, inadequate X-ray screening machines, bunching of flights at peak hours, as well as inadequate CISF and immigration personnel, the MoCA stated on Thursday. Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, after last year's congestion issue, had asked major airports - including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai - to identify bottlenecks and augment capacity to meet the growing passenger demand.
The government on Wednesday issued new guidelines for international arrivals amid the spread of mutant variants of coronavirus in many countries.
Aviation consultancy CAPA on Thursday said allowing domestic airlines to take advance bookings from April 15 is "unfair" to consumers since a decision on lifting the nationwide lockdown is yet to be taken. During the lockdown period only special flights approved by aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation, medical evacuation flights and those carrying cargo, including medical equipment, to and from different parts of the country are operational.
The directive from the civil aviation ministry came after the airlines together failed to utilise over 13 per cent of the slots allocated to them last year, official sources said. The domestic carriers have already filed their summer schedules which shows a marginal increase in the number of flights each week -- from 11,048 last year to 11,116 this year.
IndiGo confirmed the incident but said the aircraft did not face any technical issue in the past.
Even as the labour ministry gave an in-principle approval to the civil aviation ministry's proposal to classify pilots as executives instead of workmen, the pilots' unions said they would respond strongly to the move.
Defending its decision to raise the number of seats under the India-United Arab Emirates (UAE) air services pact, the Civil Aviation Ministry, in a note to the Cabinet Secretariat and key ministries, has said no additional points of call have been allowed to the Gulf country.
Thackeray also said it was wrong to impose the lockdown suddenly and now it cannot be lifted all at once.
There is increasing friction between the IAF's military requirements, and the AAI's need to provide infrastructure to many more airlines.
The Kalrock-Jalan consortium - new owners of Jet Airways - has got an assurance from around 30 airports that if the airline restarts operations, 170 pairs of slots can be made available. However, whether those slots will be according to the airline's demand will depend on the order of the insolvency court, which is slated to come next week. Sources said the new management feels it is extremely important that some of those slots are restored or else its business plan of operating Jet as a premium carrier will not be viable.
Airline companies under the Federation of Indian Airlines plan to make a presentation to the civil aviation ministry saying they will be forced to axe 8,000 employees if the government implements the new ground handling policy from January 1, 2009. About 29 per cent of the 28,000-odd employees working in the private carriers are involved in ground handling.
AAI planned to achieve gross sales of Rs 7,760 crore (Rs 77.6 billion) in 2013-14 which is approximately 23 per cent higher than the target of 2012-13, the state-run airports body said in a release.
