Patna: Spirit Air has launched charted flight services, christened “Indian Air Taxi” from Patna from July 1. The services would be offered to destinations having functional airports. Since it is a chartered service, destination is to be decided by the customer and the only pre-requisite is existence of a functional airport at the destination.
The passengers will be offered with a Cessna-172 Sky Hawk aircraft, which would have the capacity to carry three passengers apart from the pilot. The aircraft can fly for seven hours non-stop. Supposing if somebody opts for a destination more than seven hours of flying, the flight would hop at a station for re-fuelling.
One has to pay between Rs.18000 to Rs.20,000 per flying hr and the rates for flying idle hours would be Rs.12000 per hour for the first two hours and Rs.9500 for the next three hours. The private carrier had announced that it would offer air taxi services to major district towns of Bihar and Jharkhand but because of non availability of security, fire tenders and ambulance at the airstrips in districts it could not do so. These three basic facilities are a must at the time of landing and take off for an aircraft from air strips, which do not fall under any airport and this proposal has been made by the Spirit Air to the state governments.
