Bangalore 365

This Friday will see the final flight on the route.

The airline began its Bangalore run amid much fanfare. Although the airline says the route has been very successful, it is nonetheless cancelling it temporarily.

CEO Patee Sarasin said in a statement that several considerations had forced the company to reconsider its international operations, resulting in the suspension of this route despite a steadily increasing passenger-load factor.

Nok Airlines, the budget airline partly owned by Thai Airways International, has suspended its first overseas flight, between Bangkok and Bangalore in India, after five months of struggling operations.

Though industry analysts suggested that heavy losses and a low load factor prompted the airline to halt the daily Bangkok-Bangalore service, Nok chief executive Patee Sarasin insisted other constraints had led to the suspension.

He attributed ”an unexpected shortage of aircraft, increasing needs of additional human resources, and the constant rise in the cost of jet fuel” to its decision to suspend the service.

The decision was made despite the steadily increasing load factor on the route, which hit 60-65% before the suspension, he said.

Nok executives described the suspension of the flight, which was operated by the 156-seat Boeing 737-400 jetliner, as ”temporary”, but gave no clue as to when it would resume. The term ”temporary” is used to enable it hold on to the traffic right on the route.

Nok stopped accepting bookings on the Bangkok-Bangalore route in the middle of last month, two weeks before suspending the flights. It transferred pending passengers to Thai Airways International, which has been operating on the route.

They said the airline had faced great difficulties in finding additional aircraft as planned in light of a tight market caused by strong global demand for aircraft capacity. ”We are in the process of bringing on more aircraft. However, this has taken somewhat longer than we anticipated,” Mr Patee explained.

The airline has recently added two leased aircraft, 737-800s with a capacity of 190 seats, to join its six ”classic” B737-400 jetliners.The airline is also in the process of recruiting staff to deal with the additional manpower required for its expansion, Mr Patee said.

Nok wants to divert the capacity used for the Bangalore operation, which tied up an aircraft for more than eight hours a day, to match the increased flights on its domestic routes.

Executives said Nok’s second international route, Bangkok-Hanoi, which was launched on Nov 1 with two daily flights operated by B737-800, would continue as normal.

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