Letters (Spotlight Weekly)

Price Hike

Nowadays everybody talks about "price hike" of petroleum products. The cover story "POLITICS OF OIL" showed the real condition of oil prices in both the domestic and global context. In Nepal, opposition political parties, students unions and other forces protest against the government unsystematically. It is not genuine pressure to the government, they must give attention to the leakage of NOC during transportation of oil. The character of NOC staffs and the government's misplaced priority has hurt the poor village people.

S. B. Thapa
Ratna Rajya Laxmi Campus

Incompetent Article

We are very disappointed that a reputed magazine as Spotlight, which deals with profound matters and issues, has published a malicious article without doing any homework and checking on the facts. We are referring to your article “Private Airlines – Cutthroat Competition” (SPOTLIGHT January 14). The correspondent, whose name you refuse to divulge, seems to have absolutely no knowledge of aviation and neither does the so called “aviation expert”. If we were to highlight the errors in the article, this letter would be longer than the article itself. Thus we will just point out a few of the errors in the article which would show that your correspondent was both very ignorant and misled or was trying to harm the reputation of Cosmic Air deliberately. Your correspondent writes “With two old Fokker 100 jet aircraft, Cosmic Airline is competing in New Delhi sector with other airlines.” First of all the name of the airline is Cosmic Air and not Cosmic Airline and we wonder what he means by old. Does he mean that RNAC and Indian Airlines have newer aircraft? To enlighten your correspondent our Fokker 100 are lesser in age than all the fleet of RNAC and Indian Airlines. In fact the only aircraft used that is newer than ours is the 737-800s of Jet Airways and Sahara and the newly procured Airbus of Druk Air. Furthermore, we are surprised that starting with 2 aircraft is something your correspondent feels is worthless. We would like to ask your correspondent as to how many aircraft did Jet and Sahara start with. They also started with similar fleet sizes. Perhaps your correspondent is not aware that the fleet size of RNAC is two jets and until 3 months back, Druk Air also operated with two aircraft. Based on your correspondent’s reasoning the most profitable airline in the US, Southwest Airlines, or the most popular budget airline in Asia, Air Asia, should never have started because they ventured out with similar fleet sizes. Or for that matter Deccan Air in India, Bangkok Airways in Thailand, Tiger Air in Singapore, Ryan Air in the UK, including the two Indian private airlines mentioned .The list continues. Your correspondent also wrote, “Indian airlines Sahara and Jet Airways are flying ‘wide body’ latest Boeing 737 aircraft.” Anybody with the slightest knowledge of aviation would laugh at this statement. Your correspondent and his “aviation expert” may call the 737 a ‘wide body’ aircraft but everywhere else in the world and even the manufacturer Boeing classifies them as narrow body aircraft on account of its single aisle. Your correspondent goes on “At a time when all other airlines fly latest aircraft at a reasonably good price and wide internal and international connection, Cosmic Air’s fair reduction will benefit only a few.” Which airlines is he talking about – Royal Nepal or Indian Airlines with their latest fleet? As for the rest of the sentence “wide internal and international connection” it continues to puzzle us. What internal connections is your correspondent referring to? We are not aware that Jet, Sahara, Indian Airlines or Druk had “wide internal connections” in Nepal. Alternatively is your correspondent suggesting that Cosmic Air should have a wide domestic network in India? Cosmic Air has the most extensive domestic network within Nepal among all the airlines mentioned and carries more than 10 times the number of domestic passengers than RNAC, the national carrier. As for “international connections” any person with a slight knowledge of aviation matters would know that international connections are not gained by operating to each and every destination by the same airline but that these are governed by Air Services Agreements. One form of furthering “international connections” is by tie-ups with other airlines by a process called interline and code-sharing. Is your correspondent aware of how many international destinations Sahara and Jet operate to? Colombo and Kathmandu, which when added up equals to 2 which is the same number of destinations that Cosmic Air flies to, Dhaka and Delhi.

Jarina Tingbo
PR & Publicity Department
Cosmic Air.

Koirala Angry ?

Girija Prasad Koirala blamed the airport security personnel for his "humiliation" as he claimed and protested against the unwarranted search carried out by RNA officials of the helicopter he flew back on 12 January 05 from Chitwan. It was reported by RNA that the search was a routine check carried out in accordance with the instructions issued by civil aviation authorities. As such why was Koirala angry for such check if he was not guilty or suspicious? But who cares if Koirala is angry? He is just a common man of the street and he is not above Nepal's laws and regulations. Moreover he has no right to protest if appropriate action is taken by HMG officials for his follies. It would be best for him now to return to Varanasi, India, where he truly belongs and leave Nepal in peace.

Mrigendramani Dixit
Lalitpur