Mandatory commercial flights from Gautam Buddha Airport suspended

KATHMANDU, Dec 07: The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) has suspended the instructions issued for mandatory commercial flights from Gautam Buddha International Airport for the time being.

CAAN has issued a notification that the binding arrangement has been suspended for four months. Pradeep Adhikari, director general of the authority, had issued binding instructions for commercial flights to operate the Gautam Buddha Airport. The same official cut off the Kathmandu-Delhi flight of Nepal Airlines Corporation for not flying as per instructions.

Based on the advice of the official, instructions were issued to Nepali Airlines to start commercial flights from October 1st and foreign airlines from December 15th. International airlines were unhappy with the binding arrangement. According to sources, some companies reached Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and said that they could not fly according to the instructions of the authorities.

Any company looks at profit and loss while doing commercial flights. There are no passengers who need to fly from Gautam Buddha,' the representatives of that company said, 'we may have to postpone the flight to Nepal.'

After strong opposition from foreign international companies, the Director General has postponed the binding arrangement for the time being. "The director general has run the authority on his own accord. No company representative is happy with his style,” a representative of a foreign airline company told Bizmandu.

But the Director General Officer has said that he brought in a binding system only to make Gautam Buddha commercially successful. Our Gautam Buddha has a debt of 12 billion rupees. I am determined that the airport should be run at any cost even to pay that debt," he told Bizmandu a few days ago, "Working people are not allowed to do anything here."

Some of the recent decisions made by officials have been controversial. He had prepared to hand over the ground handling of Gautam Buddha Airport to Himalaya Airlines saying that the Corporation was not flying.

But India strongly disagreed with this decision. India has said that there is Chinese investment in Himalaya Airlines and the matter of giving ground handling to it is serious. India has not yet given Himalayan permission to fly into its country. With India's disagreement, Himalaya's preparations to hand over the commercial ground handling of Gautam Buddha have been stopped.