Sky Palace Airways (Tampa International) was informed by the US Department for Transportation (DOT) on January 23 that it requires further information on the start-up's application to conduct interstate and foreign charter flights.
The additional information request can be broadly summarised into the following areas:
- Sky Palace needs to provide further detail on its current ownership and capital contributions;
- The airline's application has discrepancies in job titles, periods of employment and roles of named executives in comparison to other documents supplied by Sky Palace. The DOT requires further clarification on these matters;
- Further identification of all pre-operating expenses, including aircraft delivery, aircraft parking expenses, fuel, aircraft handling, aircraft loan payments;
- Revised forecasts and financial statements should the 12-month period in the first year of planned operations be any different to those submitted, which assumed an April launch;
- The financial impact of any delay to the receipt of the airline's first aircraft.
Sky Palace has been given 30 days to respond to the information requests. In the meantime, the DOT's processing of the start-up airline's application will be deferred until the material has been received.
Sky Palace had originally planned to launch ACMI/charter flights in January 2020, a start date which was subsequently delayed until April 2020.
Established in 2018 by Floridian investors led by Hitesh (John) Adhia and Kiran Patel, Sky Palace intended to acquire two B777-200(ER)s for its ACMI operations at a cost of USD11.5 million each (net, and post-conversion). In August 2019, these aircraft were planned to arrive in Sky Palace's fleet in October 2019 and May 2020 - yet according to the letter from the DOT, the airline has yet to receive any of them. Again in the authority's communication, it details that a third aircraft is scheduled to join the fleet in November 2020 to allow the airline to start charter flights.
