Civil Aviation Ministry launches UDAN 5.0 to further enhance connectivity to remote areas

The government has launched the fifth round of the Regional Connectivity Scheme — UDAN — with the Ministry of Civil Aviation initiating process of inviting bids from airlines for various routes under this fifth round of bidding for its regional connectivity scheme

The government has launched the fifth round of the Regional Connectivity Scheme — UDAN — to further enhance the connectivity to remote and regional areas of the country.

With this, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) on April 21 initiated the process of inviting bids from airlines for various routes under this fifth round of bidding for its regional connectivity scheme UDAN by releasing a bid document.

According to a tweet from the Ministry of Civil Aviation on April 21, only aircraft operations of Category 2 (20-80 seats) and Category 3 (>80 seats) will fall in this round with no restriction on the distance between the origin and destination, with stage length cap of 600 km waived.

According to a statement from the Ministry released on April 21 evening, some of the key features were the earlier stage length cap of 600 km is waived off and there is no restriction on the distance between the origin and destination of the flight; viability gap funding (VGF) to be provided will be capped at 600 km stage length for both Priority and Non-Priority areas which were earlier capped at 500 km and no predetermined routes would be offered.

Only Network and Individual Route Proposal proposed by airlines will be considered and the airlines would be required to submit an action/business plan after two months from the issuance of Letter of Authorisation (LoA) wherein they submit their aircraft acquisition plan/availability of aircraft, crew, slots, etc. at the time of the technical proposal.

The statement mentioned the same route would not be awarded to a single airline more than once, whether in different networks or in the same network and added, "Exclusivity will be withdrawn if the average quarterly passenger load factor [PLF] is higher than 75% for four continuous quarters, to prevent exploitation of the monopoly on a route."

Also Read: Centre has plans to include 21 more airports under Krishi Udan: Jyotiraditya Scindia