New Delhi Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Thursday said that India will have to look at a hub and spoke model to bring more passengers into the country.
Speaking at the Annual General Meeting of PHDCCI, Scindia said that the aim should be to make India a strong aviation hub, allowing more passengers to travel from here to different parts of the world and vice versa.
“We have to look at putting in place systems that allow connectivity on long-distance travel to places like Europe, where we currently have one or two airlines that fly to such destinations,” Scindia said.
Currently, Air India flies extensively to Europe and North America. In addition, the national carrier, Vistara, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines, operates flights to Europe.
Scindia said that India has to look at hub and spoke model to connect places like Europe, North America, South America, parts of Central Asia, and hence building an aviation hub in the country is of utmost importance.
A hub is a central airport through which flights are routed, and spokes are the routes that aircraft exit the hub airport.
Some popular examples of this are airports in Middle East cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi (UAE) and Doha (Qatar).
Scindia also said that around 20-40 million Indians who currently travel by trains will switch to commercial airlines for their travel needs in the coming years.
Scindia said, “Within the next five to six years you are going to see an environment where the mode of travel will overtake AC class in civil aviation railways.”
“The runway is huge and today we are just entering the taxiway,” he said.
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