As the scheduling season moves from Northern Summer to Northern Winter, there are new flights, change in equipment, increase and decrease in frequency and this year – shifting from Air India to Air India Express. Amidst all these changes, there is one route which specifically caught my attention.
Star Air, the Bengaluru headquartered all Embraer airline, launched flights between Kolhapur and Ahmedabad starting October 28, 2024. The four times a week operation sees the E145 ERJ being deployed which is configured with 50 seats, in all economy configuration
S5165 KLH1100 – 1220AMD
S5166 AMD1250 – 1410KLH
Flights will operate on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays
There are a few keywords here, frequency, ERJ and configuration. Why did it interest me? The route is a new route for Star Air, connects two destinations it already serves and most importantly has seen operation by IndiGo in the recent past, where it operated the ATR 72-600 aircraft with 78 seats.
If my memory serves me right, IndiGo launched this ATR route in the middle of pandemic, sometime around June 2022 with a thrice a week operation, which later scaled up to four times a week and subsequently stopped in June 2023. A look at data released by the DGCA shows that the flight averaged between 40 to 60 passengers each way for most months and the airline was operating a 78 seat aircraft. To reiterate, Good loads are only part of the story. Good loads do not guarantee high fares, high fares does not mean good revenue, good revenue does not assure profits.
The route from Ahmedabad to Kolhapur is 734 kms long and one of the longer sectors for the ATR 72-600. A two hour flight on the turboprop is not the most optimum for costs, as they are built more for shorter hops and the performance trimmed for such short hops higher cycles scenario. A longer flight, with a lower load factor is a double whammy. IndiGo is not known to abruptly cut routes. The aim of this flight, which was a mid-day flight, was to feed the hub at Ahmedabad and connect Kolhapur to North India, especially Delhi via Ahmedabad while it already had connectivity to Hyderabad and Bengaluru. The fact that the flight was pulled out is a fair indicator that it did not do well.
Can the E-jet do what ATR could not?
As Star Air starts this route, it does not have the hub advantage of Ahmedabad which IndiGo had, but it has the local advantage with the Ghodawat group who are promoters of Star Air being based out of Kolhapur. The aircraft being deployed is the 50 seater E145, where there will be minimal spillover of demand or in most cases right sized to what the historic demand has been. The flying time at one hour and twenty minutes is shorter than the two hours of the ATR.
A lot has changed in the market in terms of pricing from mid pandemic times to now, but on random dates the pricing does not seem to be such that it is market stimulating but more of an indicator that there is a good build up of loads.
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Star Air has been expanding beyond the RCS-UDAN routes and this is another of its non-RCS routes, where the airline does not get any subsidy for operations and instead has to rely fully on the market demand and pricing to make money. The last few quarters has seen the airline select one focus town and add flights around those, a strategy which it tried in the past with Kishangarh, followed by Nanded, Shivamogga and so on. Kolhapur, being the hub for the Ghodawat group, could be next to be the focus town in terms of capacity and quite a few points within its current network could be connected to make the operations strong.
Currently, Star Air is the largest regional carrier in India and while it is often described itself as “born for UDAN”, it is taking strides beyond UDAN, indicating the confidence it has.
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Image Courtesy: Star Air website