An Indian American entrepreneur is all set to give Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines tough competition when it starts its international service from Bangalore to San Francisco next year.
Capt Rahul Puranik, who owns the Sawnae Group of Companies in Atlanta, plans to  to kickstart a new airline on the same sector by June, next year.
The Sawnae Group, which is into construction business and owns hotel properties, has applied to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) of the USA seeking permission to fly into India. The new airline will be called Sapphire Airways.
Speaking to Deccan Herald here on Monday, Capt Puranik said he was negotiating with both Airbus and Boeing to place orders for either A330-200 or B777 aircraft. However, if the new aircraft are not available on order, he would lease them out. He would initially launch the airline with four aircraft and would fly six times a week to Bangalore.
A full-service carrier, the airline would have business and economy classes and fares would be competitive. “Fares would be lesser than the non-stop carriers,” he said noting that people would not be too willing to fly more than 16-hours non-stop between India and US. His airline would be modern but would yet have an ethnic Indian touch, he added.
“I am planning to launch with the San Francisco-Munich-Bangalore flight initially. Later, Indian operations would be expanded to serve Chicago-London-Mumbai and New York-London-Delhi,” Capt Puranik, who has experience in flying the Boeing aircraft, remarked.
Asked why he planned to halt at Munich, he said it was because there was a lot of IT-related interest in the German city and so he decided to link it with the Indian IT hub.
He noted that almost the entire airline outsourcing would be done from India including call centre and back office. Cabin crew would be mainly from India.
An US citizen, Capt Puranik, born in Maharashtra, said he would invest $130 million in the airline venture of which $35 m would be pumped in by promoters, $40 m would be raised as debt and another $ 40 million from private institutional investors.
Commenting on the venture, Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation’s India chief Kapil Kaul noted that Sapphire could look at code sharing with US airlines.
It will be easy for a US airline to fly to India than an Indian carrier because of the open sky policy. Also, an Indian carrier has to be five years old as a domestic player and should have a fleet strength of 20 aircraft before launching an overseas venture. Mallya who plans to fly India-US non-stop, is yet to get the permission to fly abroad because of this restriction but the government is likely to relax this provision shortly.