Air Kerala: UAE-Based Businessman to Launch India's Newest Airline

Dubai-based Indian businessman Afi Ahmed is planning to launch a new Indian airline called Air Kerala that will target expatriates from the Indian state of Kerala. 

The founder of the UAE-based travel agency Smart Travels is currently looking at different ways to turn the airline into a successful venture. Ahmed's latest announcement comes a month after he purchased the airkerala.com domain name from an Emirati company for 1 million dirhams.

Air Kerala was first announced by the Government of Kerala in 2005 and registered as a fully-owned subsidiary of Cochin International Airport Limited (CIAL) in 2006. The goal of the airline is to provide more flight options at lower prices for Indian citizens from Kerala who are currently living in the UAE as expatriates. Despite being widely discussed as a topic, the airline was postponed multiple times over the years.

The airkerala.com domain name was first purchased in 2000 by the domain sales portal Executive Bachelors.com, a subsidiary of the UAE-based 1971 Investments. The domain name, which had an estimated value of 2.5 million dirhams in 2005, has been owned by Executive Bachelors.com for more than two decades. That all changed when Afi Ahmed was able to purchase the name due to being "the right client to come by", according to Executive Bachelors.com employee Sathar Al Karan.
 

Ahmed said, "I was looking for a domain for my B2C project. I wanted to launch an aggregator website, and I was looking for a catchy name when I saw that airkerala.com was available for purchase. I was shocked, because Air Kerala is a project that was announced by the Kerala government in 2005, and has been a hot topic among Keralites all over the world for almost two decades."

Air Kerala has received great support from Indian citizens from Kerala who reside in the UAE after Ahmed announced the revival of the project. According to Ahmed, “Everyone knew about Air Kerala. However, once I bought it, I realized that I have a once-in-a-lifetime chance of creating a meaningful impact. So now, I am trying to revive the airline.”

Multiple individuals and representatives from the aviation industry have also offered to provide financial support for the airline's launch.

The launch of Air Kerala comes at a time when the aviation industry is rapidly growing in India. The country now has the world's third-largest domestic aviation market after the US and China. India's Civil Aviation Secretary Rajiv Bansal has even suggested that India could become the world's largest aviation market by 2030. 

Air Kerala is expected to meet growing travel demand from the country, especially as its population grows and more people acquire the means to travel internationally.