Additional Flights from Europe to Bangalore

Both British Airways and Air France have started flying into Bangalore. link and link.

This will bring in much needed competition to Lufthansa, which flies Bangalore to Frankfurt direct. Air India too has a flight out of Bangalore but requires a 5-6 hour stop over at Mumbai. I haven't seen a Lufthansa flight that wasn't jam packed as yet, and getting tickets was always a bit dicey. Now, that we have 2 additional carriers, hopefully, some of the traffic will be diverted. In addition, I hope the competition leads to a reduction in ticket prices.

Air France infact has a special inaugural return fare from Bangalore to CDG, Paris at Rs 19000/- ($421/-), which is pretty amazing. What that translates to is a price of around $1000 for return fare from the East Coast of USA to Bangalore.

Most of the people flying into Bangalore are of three types

1. Parents flying back home after visiting children in the U.S. or folks travelling to India to meet family (40%)
2. Business Travellers, many of whom are crammed in economy class (50%)
3. Only about 10% travel on holiday.

By reducing the ticket prices, type 1 and type 3 are bound to increase and the additional capacity will be filled up quite quickly.

The only real problem with the flights are that they aren't Boeing 747s but A340s. I can't comment on the A340s technical advantages but as a passenger I always found A340s quite cramped The leg room is minimal and when one has a 20 hour flight (10 hours to Frankfurt and 10 from Frankfurt to Bangalore), its not easy.

FOAF said that 747s cannot land in Bangalore due to runway concerns. I don't know if that is the case, but we definitely don't have any 747s landing here. All that will change once the new airport is built.

Myopic view of bangalore airport