About a decade ago, in the year 2013, an Indian regional airline named Air Deccan, which is remembered as Indi's first low cost domestic airline, used to offer something which was no less than unbelievable.?
Air Deccan used to offer "a few seats every day" for Re 1 each.?"Costing of the Re 1 offer is no gimmick,"?G R Gopinath, managing director of Deccan Aviation, the parent firm of Air Deccan, had clarified back then, adding that?"each flight will have about three seats that will be offered at Re 1." "I would want the seat to go to say a retired person in Bangalore who might want to visit his daughter in Delhi. But, on the Internet, I can't really stop people from buying a ticket ," he had said.?
Air Deccan was committed to being a low cost carrier and "we wouldn't want to change that culture within the organisation", he had added. Air Deccan started its operations with one leased turbo-prop aircraft from French aircraft maker ATR. Subsequently it has added aircraft from European civil aircraft maker, Airbus, to its fleet. "If you buy up all the 180 seats on an Airbus to Delhi from here, the average fare works out to Rs 3,900," Gopinath said, despite offering a few at Rs 1. "Instead of offering tickets at prices starting from Rs 500, we will start with Rs 1 and use the same process".?
So, tickets were offered at Re 1, Rs 500, Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000, Rs 2,500 and so on up to Rs 6,000, the maximum on the Bangalore - Delhi flight.?
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In December 2017,?Air Deccan had relaunched operations with what it is remembered for the most — Re 1 tickets. For the unversed,?Air Deccan, which was founded by GR Gopinath in 2003, had merged with Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines in 2008 but was grounded in 2012 due to financial issues. Then in 2017, the airline began?its second innings. But in 2020,?Air Deccan announced that it is ceasing its operations until further notice, due to the covid pandemic.
Not many are aware that it was?in the summer of 2005, a retired army officer-turned-businessman GR Gopinath had predicted that he would enable Indians to fly at one rupee. Back then, the one rupee ticket fired the imagination of the people and quickly became a buzzword, Capt Gopinath had mentioned in his memoir. As per a BBC report, he believed his airline had not "only broken the price barrier, but India's caste and class barrier to flying.
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