Directorate General of Civil Aviation to take call on Vistara in 10 days

MUMBAI|NEW DELHI: The civil aviation ministry has asked India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation to hurry up with the decision on a licence to Vistara, Tata Sons’ airline venture with Singapore Airlines. “We asked them to expedite it and they have assured us it will be done in 10 days," a senior civil aviation ministry official told ET.

Separately, a top executive at the salt-to-software conglomerate said he expects the airline to undergo proving flights—usually the final stage before a flying license is given—this week.

In this stage, the airline operates a mock flight between a pair of cities in its planned network. The flight has DGCA personnel who check how the airline crew operates the flight and handles unusual situations. The stage usually comes after the airline has had its operations manual approved and its main base inspected by the regulator’s officials.

Once approved the final permit is expected to come with a fortnight.

“We have firm plans to start by end of December,” he said. The salt-to-software conglomerate owns 51% in Vistara while the rest is owned by Singapore Airlines. The proposal is one of several that followed the government’s decision to allow foreign airlines to pick up stake in their Indian peers.

Vistara, like Tata’s other venture with Malaysian carrier AirAsia, has faced several delays in getting regulatory approvals, thereby pushing its commencement of operations by several months. The latest round of delays came as the DGCA changed and upgraded several rules after the US Federal Aviation Administration downgraded it earlier this year to category II, which includes countries such as Ghana and Zimbabwe. “There were new sets of rules, so the airline had to rework a lot of its documentation after it had fully prepared it.

Sometimes they were filing documents even as new rules were being written,” he said.