NAC Decides to Buy Two Airbuses

One plight of the national flag carrier of Nepal seems finally to be nearing an end. Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) has finally chosen the planes it will be buying. A meeting of NAC´s executive committee on Monday decided in favor of two aircraft from Airbus, the European manufacturer, it said in a statement. The committee has settled on one plane in the A320-200 series, at a cost of US dollars 41.289 million, and one in the A330-200 series, at 92.845 million dollars, the statement said.

The proposed wide-body A330-200 has a seat capacity of 279 while the narrow-body A320-200 has a seat capacity of 150.

“After analyzing the proposals that we received, the proposal forwarded by Airbus was found to be more profitable, commercially and otherwise,” the statement reads. NAC had called for bids on April 7 this year to supply the planes. According to NAC, apart from Airbus, American aircraft manufacturer Boeing had also submitted a proposal.

NAC had formed a 14-member committee to evaluate the bids submitted by both manufacturers. The committee submitted its report in June. The committee leaned towards Airbus as the operating cost of the A330-200 was found to be 40 percent less than the wide-body Boeing 767 and Boeing 777 that had been proposed by Boeing. NAC also wanted to go for Airbus to maintain operational homogeneity in its fleet, which includes two Boeing 757s.

It had been recommended that NAC go for Airbus for the narrow-body aircraft instead of buying one Boeing and one Airbus because the airline would not need different sets of people to fly and maintain these two aircraft. The same set of pilots and technicians could fly and maintain both the A320-200 and A330-200. According to NAC sources, if they had gone for the new Boeings these would be completely different from the two Boeings NAC currently has and they would need to train people to fly and maintain them.

The Airbuses will be the first planes that NAC is buying after it bought two Boeings, in 1987 and 1988. The purchase is part of a five-year plan under which NAC aims to add six jets.

The flag carrier has been under fire for a long time as the planes that it has for international flights have been grounded again and again due to technical failures and NAC is losing customers even as more and more airlines are making their way to Nepal.