Acasa Airlines eyes international expansion with new flights to Africa and the Middle East, ETTravelWorld

The company also said that the DGCA is conducting routine audits across all airlines as part of its ongoing efforts to continuously uphold and elevate aviation safety standards in India.

Akasa Air will consider operating flights to Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt and some other countries, and the three-year-old airline now feels “very good” about the delivery schedule for its Boeing planes, according to its CEO Vinay Dubey.

Dube, the founder, also stressed that Acasa Airlines’ international expansion will continue on track and said that the company will soon announce flights to Sharjah.

The airline has a fleet of 30 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, and expects to add “more aircraft” this year.

“Our planes are capable of hitting the shores of East Africa, certainly they can go to Mauritius and on the southern side, they can go to Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt… We can (also) go to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan… The Boeing 737 MAX is also capable of going deep into South Asia… Everything will be taken into account,” Dubey told PTI in an interview.

Currently, the airline operates flights to six international cities – Doha (Qatar), Jeddah, Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Kuwait City (Kuwait) and Phuket (Thailand) – and 24 domestic destinations.

According to Dube, the airline’s available seat counters (ASK) are now 20 percent international and 80 percent domestic, and the overseas pie is expected to reach about 30 percent by the end of March 2027.

In general, ASK is a measure of an airline’s passenger carrying capacity.

The airline, which has between 750 and 775 pilots, expects to resume hiring of pilots in 2026, especially first officers.

“We will need pilots in the second half of next year. So, we will have to restart the (recruitment) process much before that… We feel good about our delivery schedule, and we have more predictability,” Dubey said during the interview in the national capital.

There have been delays in deliveries of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, and earlier this month, the US Federal Aviation Administration allowed the planemaker to increase production of MAX aircraft to 42 aircraft from 38 per month.

The airline has a firm order for a total of 226 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.

Akasa Air expects to have some codeshare and codeshare partnerships in place in the next financial year, with Dube emphasizing that the airline needs to get a little bigger to be an attractive partner for a number of codeshare and codeshare partnerships that other airlines have.

Currently, the airline has a codeshare partnership with Etihad Airways.

Generally, a codeshare partnership allows an airline to book passengers on its partner carrier on a single ticket. Under a joint arrangement, the airline issues and accepts tickets for flights operated by partner carriers, and passengers will have one itinerary but different tickets.

Regarding the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) reporting some lapses in the airline, Dubey said all observations have been addressed to the satisfaction of the regulatory body.

“We had observations such that every airline has observations as part of routine audits. All these observations have been addressed to the satisfaction of the regulatory body and there is no reason to be concerned about safety at all,” he said.

Regarding financing, the Akasa Air boss said the airline is well capitalized and will consider an initial public offering (IPO) in the next two to five years.

In August, the carrier announced that it had raised funds from various investors, including Premji Invest and Claypond Capital, and that the funds would be primarily used to expand operations.

Regarding any plans to acquire wide-body and regional jets as well as changing the seat configuration, Dube said she was continuing to evaluate and stressed that the airline was driven by economic sense.

“…If we thought it was sustainably positive for us, we would jump into the wide-body mix, but our analysis so far has not concluded that it is sustainably positive,” he said.

The airline offers only economy class in its aircraft.

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