Thursday, September 28 2006 12:13 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: In a bid to raise its non-operational revenue, public sector carrier Indian has decided to sell to private domestic airlines, the surplus available seat kilometres (ASKM's) it has earned by operating flights on economically unviable but socially important routes.

The acquisition of ASKM's, especially on the Category-III routes in the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir, enable airlines to enhance their services on the major trunk or CAT-I routes by fulfilling obligations laid down for domestic operations by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

Under the domestic air transport policy, a scheduled air transport service provider operating in CAT-I routes is required to deploy at least ten per cent of its ASKM's on CAT-II routes and 50 per cent on CAT-III routes.

The state-owned carrier has already sold some ASKM's to its private rival Kingfisher Airlines.

Under the latest initiative, Indian and its subsidiary Alliance Air have logged major surplus in ASKMs and decided to sell the additional ones to private operators.

The indicating surplus of ASKMs likely to be available with the public sector carrier for sale for a six month period from October to March, 2007, would be 100 million per month in CAT-III, 20 million per month in CAT-II and one in CAT-IIA.