Akasa Air CEO on How India's Newest Startup Carrier Will Stand Out

Vinay Dube, founder and CEO of soon-to-be-launched Indian low-cost carrier — Akasa Air, has lost count of the number of times people had tried to discourage him from starting an airline.

Dube, who began his career with American Airlines and later on went to work for Delta, contemplated starting an airline in the midst of the Covid pandemic, at a time when capacity deployment for most carriers in India was down 67 percent.

Two years later, with just a few weeks left for the first Akasa flight to take off, Dube is glad that he didn’t pay heed to naysayers.

Akasa’s launch is planned for the end of July. The airline will be conducting its proving flights in the first week of July to obtain the air operator’s certificate required for its commercial launch.

“I’d like to credit the India that we're living in for allowing a professional like me to not just dream about starting a highly capital-intensive and highly regulated business, but hopefully, in a couple of weeks, launch it and get going,” Dube said while talking to Skift.

In a country of 1.3 billion where only two to three percent of the population travels by air, there are indeed opportunities galore for airlines keen to tap into the market.