Air Canada has its eye on a major new route: the airline is considering starting daily flights to India by the end of the year, according to sales staff now on the ground in Delhi.
The two obstacles, they confided to The Globe, are first a shortage of planes ("China is using up all our fleet!") and second, a fear that demand won't be consistent enough through the year to make the routes (likely non-stop to Toronto from Delhi and Mumbai) viable.
Canadian tourism in India is picking up -- there were no fewer than 20 separate Canadian tourism events held in India last year to entice the industry, with Niagara Falls the number one draw. But tourists come in the relatively short season, December through March, before the temperatures head above 30C.
There is plenty of traffic in the family of Indo-Canadians coming and going, but they fly over once a year and stay "until the very last day of their six-month visa" -- so they won't fill planes. What Air Canada is looking to see is sufficient business travel to justify the route -- there are said to be dozens of Canadian companies poised to move into India, with one nervous eye on the country's rapidly involving but still Byzantine regulatory environment.
In the meantime, the best of India's airlines, Jet Airways, has a lock on the direct service to Toronto (although the flight stops in Europe for two unpleasant hours) and also serves Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. The other Air Canada competitor would be Air India, but with almost daily stories in the media here about the national carrier's cash-crisis and spotty safety record, staff here feel it won't be much of a fight to lure away its passengers.
While Air Canada is looking at India for passengers, the Canadian aircraft industry should be paying attention too: yesterday GoAir, one of the country's proliferating no-frills airlines, announced it has placed an order for 72 new Airbus 320 aircraft, worth $7.2-billion (U.S.).
IndiGo, the fastest-growing of the low-cost carriers, has 180 of the same planes on order -- that's the single largest order ever in aviation history, at $15-billion. SpiceJet, the largest of the no-frills airlines, meanwhile, has ordered 15 Bombardier Q400 turboprop planes, worth $900-million, with an option for another 15. While the airline industry here was staggering just two years ago, with massive excess capacity, rapacious passenger demand has convinced all the players that they can afford rapid expansion.
India has only a half-dozen airlines with 350 planes serving the country, compared to more than 1,100 aircraft in use by China's many airlines.