Kingfisher will find it difficult to continue "loss making" routes, says Vijay Mallya

Mumbai, Nov. 15 (ANI): Clarifying that Kingfisher Red wouldn't fly on loss-making airlines, Kingfisher Airlines' Chairman and promoter, Vijay Mallya on Tuesday said that the cancellation of flights in the past one week was a commercially prudent decision and the Airlines would put things in perspective and provide the facts about the private carrier.

"We decided to phase out Kingfisher Red our no-frills class of service. Unfortunately, this was misconstrued as us shutting down a part of the airline, which is not true. We have very very carefully evaluated, over the last several months including the lean monsoon months, the yields that we get in all the three classes of service that we offer, Kingfisher First, Regular Kingfisher Class, Full Service Economy," Mallya told the media here.

"The cancellation of the 50-odd flights has been blamed on entirely the wrong reasons. We could have handled it better. Sometimes mistakes do happen, but there is always room for improvement. But it was a commercially prudent decision. We cannot as a private company effort to fly on routes that are heavily loss making," he said.

"We are not in the same arena as a national carrier such as Air India that perhaps has a national duty to perform with the government as its shareholder. We are accountable to our banks, we are accountable to our shareholders and therefore we did cut flights that were heavily loss making, but in doing so what we have not been able to present to you appropriately, which we hope to today is that we are acutely conscious of the importance and need for connectivity in India," he added.

Emphasising that Kingfisher Airlines has the widest network of air connectivity in this country, Mallya said: "There are destinations to which we fly exclusively and no other airlines flies to those destinations. Perhaps, they don't have the right kind of planes currently to fly to those destinations."

"But we haven't dropped anyone of those routes because we are conscious of the fact that irrespective of profit or loss, connectivity has to be maintained and it's an integral part of our country's economic growth," he added.

Mallya further said that in order to further improve our financial position, we have undertaken aircraft reconfigurations.

" The reconfigurations of these aircrafts will give us incremental revenue generation opportunities," he added.

Earlier, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had issued a show-cause notice to Kingfisher Airlines asking why it had not taken the regulator's prior approval to curtail its flight schedules as is required by this rule. (ANI)