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Atlanta airport officials last week participated in four-day trade mission to India, a fast-growing economy that has long lacked a nonstop flight link to the world’s busiest airport despite heavy advocacy from a more-than-100,000-strong diaspora community.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport General Manager Balram Bheodari, Deputy General Manager and Chief Commercial Officer J’Aimeka Farrell and International Affairs Director Alrene Barr joined 15 organizations visiting the cities of Delhi and Hyderabad on the four-day India Aerospace Mission led by the U.S. International Trade Administration.
From Sept. 19-23, participants met with civil aviation officials in the capital, along with international aerospace companies there and in Hyderabad, including Tata Lockheed Martin Aerostructures, which supplies empennages for the C-130 cargo planes built at the Lockheed plant in Marietta.
ATL officials visited GMR Group, an infrastructure company with maintenance, repair and overhaul unit called GMR Aero Technic. According to a LinkedIn post from Ms. Ferrell, they also “met with executive leaders for several India-based airlines and contributed healthy dialogue to opportunities for mutual growth in India and the U.S.”
The trip comes less than a year after Air India’s privatization last October, which saw the previously state-owned flag carrier put back into the hands of Tata Sons, the industrial conglomerate that founded it in the 1930s. The new owners have announced an ambitious transformation plan that has already spurred a headquarters move, the leasing of new aircraft and the announcement of new routes to the U.S. (San Francisco) and United Kingdom.
The Atlanta airport has held talks with Air India on previous trips but so far has not announced the return of nonstop flights to India, which would be among the longest in the world.
Delta Air Lines Inc. once briefly served India via a short-lived nonstop flight to Mumbai halted in 2009. When it decided to relaunch the direct link in 2019, the Atlanta-based carrier picked New York for the nonstop route.
Still, travelers from ATL have a slew of one-stop options to reach India through Europe and the Middle East, particularly since the arrival of Turkish Airlines and Qatar Airways in 2016. Lufthansa, the German carrier, has long served multiple destinations in India from Atlanta via one stop in Frankfurt, while Delta partners KLM and Air France serve the country through Amsterdam Schiphol and Paris Charles de Gaulle, respectively.
