Aviation: India inks pacts with Sri Lanka, 5 other countries

India has signed agreements with Sri Lanka, Finland, Spain and three other countries whereby airlines from those nations can operate unlimited number of flights to six Indian metro airports.
Such pacts have also been inked with Jamaica, Guyana, and Czech Republic.
Terming the pact as "Open Skies agreement as per NCAP (National Civil Aviation Policy) 2016", the Civil Aviation Ministry today said the new arrangement would encourage connectivity and passenger travel between India and these countries.
The pacts allow "unlimited number of flights to six metro airports namely Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai," it said in a release.

New Air Service Agreements have also been signed with Jamaica and Guyana.
These agreements were signed during the recently concluded International Civil Aviation Negotiations (ICAN) 2016 at Nassau, Bahamas.

According to the release, India held negotiations with 17 countries and 'Memorandum of Understanding' was signed with 12 countries at ICAN.
Besides, India has re-negotiated traffic rights with Oman increasing the entitlements with 6,258 seats.
With Saudi Arabia, India has agreed to increase the capacity by 8,000 seats per week, the release said.
"Indian also agreed with Ghana to increase the present allocation of 2 frequencies to 7 frequencies per week to encourage connectivity between the two countries," it added.

The ministry said negotiations were completed with 9 countries to enable the legal framework to make possible code shares between the airlines of two sides.
"The negotiations have enabled domestic code shares with Czech Republic, Portugal and Malaysia, domestic and international code shares including third country airlines with Guyana...," the release said.
Also, Mishra said, there was shortage of pilots and
crew.
"Small aircraft need specialised crew. We need a special initiative from the government to build that up. Pilots and engineers can't come overnight. We need to train them," he added.
"India produced only about 200-300 pilots every year. "The Civil Aviation University in China has 2000 trainers. It has 265 aircraft for training purposes," the ICAO official pointed out.

Observing that aviation created high value jobs and has multiplier economic effect, Mishra said "one aircraft that comes to the country, creates 600 jobs, directly and indirectly. These were not regular jobs that paid Rs 5,000 or Rs 10,000 a month but those that paid Rs 50,000 or Rs 60,000."
"Essentially, necessary infrastructure needs to be created for RCS to become successful. Airports Authority of India has readied 55 airports and there they can start the RCS," Mishra added.
Meanwhile, the FICCI report suggested that Viability Gap Funding under RCS be extended from the proposed three to five years or more as these airfields might taken even longer to become financially sustainable.

RCS operators should also be allowed to use pilots, cabin and maintenance crew of other airlines and allow foreign registered aircraft for operations.