Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) will procure six Viking Twin Otter airplanes for domestic flights with the government-owned airlines unable to operate flights to remote destinations with Chinese planes. An NAC official said a commercial proposal will soon be sent to the NAC board.
NAC has already procured four Y-12 planes to operate flights to remote destinations and two MA-60 to urban ones. But the Chinese planes have not been able to operate at the specified capacity, and suffer from lack of pilots and spare parts.
NAC now is planning to bring Twin Otters for domestic flights and is backed by Minister for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation Rabindra Adhikari. He has said he will provide consent to procure planes in his 100-day action plan stating that other airlines have been operating syndicate in remote destinations in lack of role of the government-owned airlines there.
NAC had brought Twin Otter for the first time in 1971 and operated flights to almost all the remote destinations. It has three Twin Otters even now but only one of them is in operation. The earlier Twin Otters were manufacture by de Havilland Canada but those to be procured are the ones manufactured by Viking Air.
The new ones will be of Viking DHC-6-400 series and will have 19 seats like the old ones. The NAC has estimated the six Twin Otters to cost Rs 3.25 billion at most.
