William Boulter
H
ow we may best summarise the current state of the global air cargo industry. How is the industry reacting and responding to it? Cargo demand has been buoyant on many routes, owing to the lack of the normal passenger aircraft belly space, and has supported our cargo-in-cabin charters, where with some minor equipment and procedural changes we have been able to carry significant payloads on our A320/321 passenger aircraft. In general, global air cargo demand is down by roughly 50 per cent year-onyear due to the various economic factors, etc. and India broadly follows the same trend. However, the passenger aircraft international flights have further fallen by upwards of 90 per cent, driving a dramatic collapse in the amount of belly space available for cargo. Hence, this has stimulated many airlines to convert their pax aircraft to fly cargoin the main cabin as well as in the belly too. IndiGo did this in early April and now has around ten aircraft which have the necessary equipment to carry ‘cargo-in-cabin’. What initial challenges you faced due to lockdown and other consequent measures? This is a very difficult time for the world economy in general and for the travel sector in particular. The aviation sector has been through many ups and downs in its history, but we can all agree that this crisis is unprecedented in its impact. The last few months have been very difficult for the aviation industry generally, as operations were grounded from March 25 to May 24, except for charter and cargo flights. As the Government allowed partial resumption of flights starting May 25, 2020, we resumed operations with much fewer flights than our pre-COVID capacity. For Q1 FY2021, we ended the quarter at about one fourth of our original capacity and we hope to slowly build this up in a phased manner in the coming months. Due to these on-going COVID-19 related dis18 |
september 2020
In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, the country’s largest airline had struggled hard to perform better by taking various measures like cost optimisation, efficient fleet management, maintaining liquidity, ensuring levelled cargo capacity and experimenting with new network and revenue models. William Boulter, Chief Commercial Officer, IndiGo CarGo in an exclusive interaction with Ritika Arora Bhola, emphasises on the challenges faced by the airline and strategies adopted to sail through this difficult situation. He also elaborates on the company’s plans to reach out to more international destinations, to drive more cargo traffic and leverage capacity building options.
We remain very bullish on the future of Indian aviation ruptions, we reported a net loss of 28 billion rupees during the first quarter.
Can you give us an overview of your flight operations in the wake of the crisis? Our cargo line of business was performing extremely well in any case, but then went to a new level with the carriage of essential supplies and medicines in the early weeks of the lockdown. We learned valuable lessons about the demand and scope for cargo which will definitely serve us well for augmenting our cargo operations in the months ahead. With currently 10 aircraft completely devoted to cargo, we plan to continue with ‘cargo in cabin’ operations even once we resume our full schedule. We are operating international and
domestic charters, and repatriation flights to transfer stranded citizens, which also contribute to our cargo result. We have flown over 1000 cargo charter flights from June-August 15, 2020.
Since the lockdown was imposed, passenger aircraft were being used as freighters. How difficult or easy was it to load/unload cargo in passenger aircraft? Tell us about the techniques implemented for successful operations. This is a new product, and as all products have a certain developmental cycle, we had it too. Initially, there were challenges with the volume of cargo we could carry on these flights, but we reworked our strategy and were able to turn this into our advantage.
