Dubai: Aiming to fly to two-three destinations in India by March, the new UAE airline, RAK Airways, will sign purchase agreements for four new aircraft next month, a senior official said.

"We have already initiated the aircraft purchase process and the agreements with the manufacturers will be signed next month. The initial deliveries are expected by 2011 or 2012 and until that time we will be going for leased aircraft," the Chief Operating Officer of the airline, K Ravindran said at the Ras Al Khaimah Conference 2008 yesterday.

The new aircrafts would be either Airbus 320 or Boeing 737- 800. Ravindran said that RAK Airways, which started flying in November 2007 with one leased aircraft, will have three leased aircraft by April 2008 and hope to expand the fleet to eight aircraft by April 2009.

On the expansion plans of the airline, he said that RAK Airways hopes to fly to 2-3 destinations in India by March this year along with destinations in Nepal, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Beirut. The airline currently offers services to Dhaka and Colombo.

"We will be looking to new markets in East Africa, Far East and Europe after we consolidate our regional and South Asian markets," he added.

He said that the airline would have a capacity to fly 1.4 million passengers by April 2009 and hopes to carry at least one million passengers, at 70 per cent capacity.

The airline will adopt a strategy of attracting passengers from other countries to Ras Al Khai mah and then flying them to other destinations, he added.

Source : PTI