IndiGo plans to use ATR-72 planes to feed its mainline network in a hub and spoke model.
On Tuesday IndiGo announced a provisional order for 50 ATR-72 planes valued at $ 1.3 billion at list prices. This is the second largest order of ATR-72 planes till date-the previous record order was from American Eagle airlines for 100 ATR-72 (50 firm plus 50 options) in 1990.
IndiGo expects deliveries to commence from 2017-end and will operate the aircraft on routes under regional connectivity scheme (RCS) and also other high demand short routes which are not a part of the scheme.
IndiGo is yet to disclose whether it will participate in the second round of bidding for RCS routes which takes place in three months.
According to aviation sources IndiGo is evaluating a number of destinations for its ATR aircraft and these include high demand destinations such as Dharamsala and Tirupati which are now served by rival airlines. Other options include routes in North East and Chennai-Colombo route which is also amongst the busiest international routes from India.
IndiGo has recently started through check-in of baggage for passengers (where luggage is checked-in to final destination) which is an essential part of a hub and spoke model for an airline. At present about 10-15 per cent of its passenger traffic is connecting in nature and will increase once it launches its regional routes.
IndiGo did not respond to an email query on the topic.
"IndiGo can obtain slots at Mumbai and Delhi under the RCS. Along with RCS routes it can also use the ATR aircraft to connect to routes like Delhi - Dharamshala or even Mumbai - Aurangabad. In the south, the airline could look at either converting shorter sectors like Bengaluru - Chennai to all ATR routes helping re-deploy the A320 elsewhere or start new routes like Bengaluru - Coimbatore, Bengaluru - Madurai which see demand not big enough for the A320 but large enough for the ATR," said Ameya Joshi, founder of aviation blog Network Thoughts.
According to Joshi, there is a lot of demand to connect destinations within IndiGo's existing network and ATR planes could be used to connect Ahmedabad - Indore, Ranchi - Raipur, Jaipur - Lucknow which are perfect short and thin markets for the ATR.