Airbus (AIB, Toulouse Blagnac) says it will maintain an existing order for sixty-seven A320ceos and fifteen A330-200s placed by the now defunct Indian carrier, Kingfisher Airlines (Mumbai International), in 2005 in the hopes the carrier might get a new lease on life.
“If Kingfisher finds a new buyer for the airline that buyer would need single-aisle planes, so for that reason we’ll keep them until the airline is completely shut down,” Kiran Rao, Airbus’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, told Bloomberg news.
Despite the goodwill, Airbus did cancel the airline's other outstanding order for five A380-800s and ten A350-800s in January this year.
“Speaking with Vijay Mallya, he is still determined to sell the airline; he has an operating certificate. But even if he does sell the airline, we took the decision internally here that he probably does not need the A380s just right now so we are taking them out of the order book along with the A350s,” Airbus' Chief Operating Officer - Customers, John Leahy said at a press briefing in Toulouse, France, in January.
Following its collapse in 2012, Kingfisher Airlines has announced plans on several occasions to resume services only for those plans to then fall through.
Kingfisher's debt currently stands at USD1.5billion.
With Etihad Airways (EY, Abu Dhabi International) having secured a 24% stake in Jet Airways (JAI, Mumbai International), both Qatar Airways (QR, Doha Hamad International) and flydubai (FZ, Dubai International) have both expressed an interest in acquiring their own shareholdings in an Indian airline albeit in an already profitable entity.
