By IANS
Nagpur : The launch of a new fleet of aircraft in New Delhi Saturday will mark a new phase in the booming aviation sector in India, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel has said.
Though the scheduled launch at the hands of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would comprise only five aircraft, it would mean inauguration of the new phase consisting of 111 aircraft over the next three years, Patel told reporters here Friday.
The merger of Air India and Indian (Airlines) – which is almost through with only a few technicalities remaining – into National Aviation Company with the brand name of Air India is in keeping with the new take off though it was long overdue.
Patel termed the scheduled inauguration of a non-stop Mumbai-New York Air India flight Aug 1 a new feather in the cap of the Indian aviation industry that is rapidly expanding to cover second and third tier cities.
Counting the airports in Amritsar, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Trichy, Guwahati and Nagpur as frontrunners among the non-metro Indian airports that have begun doing well, Patel said the country had a potential for a thousand airports.
The minister also referred to the upcoming plan to launch regional airlines in the country and the move to draft dedicated aircraft into postal services to further bolster their speed.
Patel informed the reporters that the leading aviation training institute CAE of Canada, which developed the aviation academy in Rae Bareli, had been assigned the task of setting up the proposed aviation academy in Gondia – the minister's home town in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region.