Gaurav's Blog

Connecting the Heart of India

Take a large map of India and spread it across the boardroom table to accommodate all of it. Next, take a black marker and draw a line beginning from the North in Kashmir across the middle of the landmass, through peninsular India close to the 82.5 degrees Indian Standard Time Meridian, down to the extreme South till you reach Kanyakumari, as if to dissect the country into two vertically equivalent halves. Chances are that the line will either go through or fall close by the cities of Delhi, Nagpur, Hyderabad and Bangalore in that order. 

Nagpur is widely considered the geographical center of India, as it is equiv-distant (about a 1000 km's) from the 4 major metros of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. It will be another half a decade before Nagpur gains some traction but go right ahead and mark it (unlike the politicians, who have largely ignored it), perhaps by drawing a small circle around it. Now draw a huge cross across the map such that the lines intersect each other at Nagpur. Think of it as a model of an hourglass. 2 Hourglasses in fact, placed at right angles to each other. Try and count the number of cities that fall inside these 2 hourglasses and have usable Airports. 

In 1962, a young 18 year old Yale student wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery services in a computer information age. He had chanced upon an article on the Indian Night Air Mail Service that was started in 1949 to deliver mail overnight in one of the world's first hub and spoke operation. Under this system, the four main cities of India also happened to form each of the four corners of a diamond- New Delhi to the north, Bombay to the west, Calcutta to the east, and Madras to the south. Connecting these cities was a central location at the city of Nagpur. He based his paper on this design and went on to found a company in 1973 that is called FedEx. His name is Fred Smith. Fed Ex rose to flourish but Nagpur, the very place that formed the basis of its idea, fell onto bad times with a decrepit, dilapidated Airport that saw fewer and fewer aircraft with every passing year. Soon it was part of the dusty bowels of India which only saw some action in an election year.

Meanwhile, Mahindra, an Indian auto-giant went on to buy an Australian aircraft company called Gippsaero. Gippsaero is much past its prime but does have a stable of small aircraft that are being revitalized with this new investment to serve the sub-20 seat aircraft market that many believe can take strong roots in India and revive Air taxi type commuter Aviation. For one, Mahindra Aircraft are tipped to cost one-third of their nearest rivals such as the ubiquitous Cessna's and Twin Otters and others.  Can Nagpur see its old glory days once again once these aircraft make it to the market in 2014-15? 

Have you counted those Airports inside the hourglass yet? I once counted more than 3 dozen usable airports within 1 hour of flying distance from Nagpur. Many of these are not in a good state and length of their runway is a limitation even for an aircraft like ATR-42 but Mahindra's GA-10 and GA-18 can easily negotiate these. 

First, the Airports need to be revitalized- not just the runways and the non-existent passenger terminals, but also the basic navigational equipment, equipment for passenger operations such as screening, security and other Airport staff needs to be mobilized. Most Airports in the region don't have any fuel storage facility, nor have any night landing facilities that negatively impact a passenger operation. There are several limitations but a completely new aviation market will open up if this happens.

The cost of operations are so high, that with a sub-20 seat aircraft, any company would need to have at least 20 aircraft before a sustainable scale could be achieved to continue its existence (despite the low set up costs with Mahindra aircraft).  With enough incoming traffic from metro cities on larger airline companies coming to Nagpur, a feeder that connects most of central India, can most definitely thrive. There are several examples of small feeder carriers (such a Cape Air) in the US. And Mahindra would need to ensure an eco-system that supports and nurtures this- for example, it simply can't expect to come and sell aircraft right away- because such an eco-system does not exist today, it will also have to invest in training facility for the pilots, engineers, technicians, mechanics, taking the burden off from a company that will operate its aircraft. 

This is not a new approach at all. Although Nagpur is "Hot and High" (Temperatures here reach a staggering 49 degree Celsius in the summer months and Nagpur is at the elevation of 310.5 meters) that makes operational efficiency of the aircraft suffer, conditions are slowly developing for it to be tapped as a feeder Hub for the North-South or East-West traffic flows that are large enough, to reconsider such a network design.