Pink and white themed new airline Air Carnival will launch its operations from Monday, July 18. The airline, which is based in Coimbatore, will focus on short-haul services with ATR72-500 aircraft.
Re. 1 is the fare price for the first flight and for the first three months, the ticket is priced at Rs. 999.
The airline's first flight will be on the Coimbatore-Chennai-Madurai route, Manish Kumar Singh, CEO of Air Carnival, was quoted as saying by the Business Standard.
The 70-seater wing propelled aircraft is more economical for shorter distances, Singh further added. Air Carnival will be operating on 10 routes, which includes daily flights from Coimbatore to Chennai and vice-versa. In addition, it will also operate two flights from Chennai to Madurai daily.
"The airline will start services with ATR72-500 aircraft initially and plans to add two more by the end of 2016," Air Carnival said on its website.
At present, the airline will start operations using only one aircraft. It would add its second aircraft by end of September and a third one by the end of October. Once three ATR's are inducted to its fleet, it will expand its operations to other cities such as Bengaluru, Tirupati, Hubli and Trivandrum, the Business Standard report added.
Initially, the company will focus on South Indian market for a year and then it plans to expand to other parts of the country. "The first flight will be from Coimbatore at 6:55 a.m. on Monday, July 18. The response has been good and the first flight will have 100 percent occupancy," the CEO was quoted as saying by the Hindu.
Air Carnival is the subsidiary of Coimbatore Marine College Group (CMC) of Institutions, which was established in 2002 in Coimbatore. S Irudaya Nathan, the director of CMC Group, established the charter flight services in New Delhi in 2013.
CMC will also invest about $12-15 million in Air Carnival, which would help to fund acquiring 3-5 new aircraft. "Once we stabilise, we will look to raise money from investors. This is the right time to start operations since demand is high and fuel prices have also dropped," Singh was quoted as saying by the BS.
