Kuwait's Jazeera Airways launches India operations

Hyderabad: Kuwaiti low-cost carrier Jazeera Airways Friday launched its operations in India with a daily flight between Kuwait and Hyderabad.

The airline said that seat capacity between India and the Gulf country needs to be increased in view of the current demand.

Rohit Ramachandran, CEO of Jazeera said the airline will connect Mumbai, Kochi and Ahmedabad with Kuwait by mid-January next year.

"We would like to fly to lot more points in India and (with) lot more frequency into India. We are unable to do so because the restrictions are put on us on the number of flights that we can operate to India," Ramachandran told reporters here.

He said that the current seat-entitlements between India and Kuwait stands at a modest 12,000 seats only in each direction.

Ramachandran said the airlines is requesting the two governments to engage in negotiations to enhance the number of seats being currently flown.

"We urge the Indian and Kuwait governments to engage in discussions which will liberalise and open up more capacity of airlines of both the countries to fly into each others territory," he said.

According to him, currently there is need to increase seat capacity by three fold owing to the demand.

To a query, he said Jazeera Airways has currently a fleet of eight aircraft and another one is expected to be inducted by February next year.

By 2020, the fleet size would be 15 aircraft, he said.

According to him, Jazeera is well connected to most of important locations in the middle east from Kuwait.

Established in April 2004, Jazeera Airways is the first private airline in the Middle East.