The 5-year rule for Indian airlines seems to have finally been scrapped

The Indian government is ready to let go of one of the major conditions for airlines to be able to fly abroad.

As reported earlier, the 5/20 rule for airlines say that they must have flown on domestic routes for five years and have a minimum of 20 aircrafts in their fleet to be able to fly on inteenational route. However, the five-year rule doesn’t feature in a note circulated by the civil aviation ministry for inter-ministerial consultations on Friday, suggesting that it might be reconsidered as was demanded.

Apart from this, a new condition suggests that every airline will have to maintain 20% of the total capacity in the domestic sector all the time.
Most likely, this will be made into the final policy because ministers have informally approved this in their meetings.

"We have the consent of all these ministers and ministries and the cabinet approval should come by the end of this month," said a senior aviation ministry official on the condition of anonymity.

PM Modi has earlier said that he wants the rule to be scrapped.

If the rule is scrapped, Vistara and AirAsia India, launched in 2015 and 2014 respectively, will get immediate benefit as they would be able to fly on profitable international routes even before they complete five years on local routes. However, both of them would have to add more planes to their fleet, given that Vistara has 11 and AirAsia has 14 aircrafts as of now.

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