Air India to develop T3 terminal as hub for turnaround project

Air India yesterday announced its plans to use the new integrated terminal T3 at IGI Airport as its hub terming it a part of its turnaround project. According to airline CMD Arvind Jadhav the airline, operating from the new terminal, would provide seamless travel for its passengers on all sectors, which would likely increase business by over 20 per cent over the long run.

Announcing three new direct international routes by October, he said these would increase AI's international coverage to 22 destinations from Delhi.

He said AI had been looking forward to the development of the integrated terminal to enable it to connect India with the world.

"The goal for AI is to establish a dominant domestic carrier that would use narrow-body aircraft to seamlessly feed into the medium-haul and long-haul wide-body aircraft. Together, the combined network would provide the customer with an end-to-end offering that could be matched neither by the domestic low-cost carriers nor the hub-based international long-haul carriers,'' he said.

The terminal is expected to provide AI a number benefits the major among them being the reduction in the minimum connecting time between flights to about 15 minutes as against the present 30 minutes to a few hours.

"For an airport to be used as a hub, the airline has to be given the advantage of being able to use seamless transfers from one sector to the other, both between domestic and international flights. Consequently, AI plans to not just improve its feeder routes between domestic and international routes but also focus on large markets such as London-Melbourne, London-Kathmandu, Bangkok-Paris etc,'' said Jadhav.