Competitors-turnedcohorts Kingfisher and Jet Airways compel public carriers to mull possible betrothals and even mergers to weather the current crisis.

The brilliant blue tapestry of clear sky cloaking Hyderabad on October 15 offered sharp contrast to the mix of gloom and despair at the inauguration of the first India Aviation 2008 Exhibition, organised to project and promote the country’s civil aviation sector. Next day, the papers carried a rather unusual photograph of the Chairmen of the two biggest private airlines, Jet Airways and Kingfisher. Seen riding together in an exhibition ground golf cart, the duo’s grim visage appeared stretched to accommodate pasty smiles evidently for the benefit of the paparazzi. What the camera could not capture, quite literally, was a begging bowl extended towards Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel. The request was for an unprecedented Rs 5,000 crore ($1 billion) government bail out to pull back private airlines from the brink of collapse.

Reeling under the combined onslaught of overcapacities and rocketing crude oil prices, the global financial meltdown proved to be the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back. Turning all earlier prophesies on their heads, the growth in the air passenger traffic shifted gears in the reverse. The load factors dropped, creating a Catch-22 type of situation because in a bid to check increasing losses, the airlines resorted to increase in fares, which, coupled with mounting fuel surcharges, forced many a newly initiated air traveller back to the railways and other means of ground transportation. Till recently, the high fares had affected just the smaller towns with first-time flyers from outside metros hopping back onto trains. But now the whole country appears to have become diffident about flying. Airports Authority of India’s figures compiled for the month of July for the country’s busiest airports—Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata—saw the number of flyers fall by roughly 16 per cent. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s figures for September were even more depressing which show that the domestic travel has hit a five-year low of 27.19 lakh (2.719 million). Last year, during the same month, 33.38 lakh (3.38 million) people had taken the domestic flights.