NEW DELHI: The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has turned down IndiGo’s request to wet lease (hire planes with operating crew and engineers) wide body aircraft from Turkish Airlines for two years — one year extendable by the same period.
The regulator is learnt to have “perceived” this request as a “diversion of traffic rights in collusion with a strong foreign carrier” that will mainly feed the latter’s hub abroad by bringing in hundreds of passengers from India on wide body aircraft, say people in the know. A majority of these passengers will then take the foreign airline’s connecting flights from the hub to rest of the world and ditto on the way back to India. IndiGo has only single aisles in its fleet.
