You can now travel on a seaplane between the Statue of Unity near Kevadiya in Gujarat’s Narmada district and Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad. This is the first ever seaplane service for Gujarat and was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday.
The twin-engine plane covers a distance of around 200 kms in 40 minutes. The journey by road to cover this distance takes around five hours. Floating jetties and water aerodrome buildings have been built at the riverfront and at pond-3 near Sardar Sarovar Dam to enable passengers to board and alight from the plane.
The service will be operated by SpiceJet’s fully-owned subsidiary, Spice Shuttle. Daily two flights will be operated on the Ahmedabad-Kevadiya route from Saturday, the company said in a statement.
The all-inclusive one-way fares will begin from Rs 1,500 under the UDAN scheme and tickets will be available /www.spiceshuttle.com/ from October 30 onwards, the airline said. SpiceJet will be using Twin Otter 300 seaplanes, built by planemaker de Havilland Canada. They can seat up to 19 people, including passengers and crew.
Kevadiya does not have an airport but has plenty of water due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam on Narmada river.
The Gujarat government had earlier announced that it had signed an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) and Airports Authority of India (AAI) in July (2020) to begin the first-ever seaplane services in Gujarat to provide seamless and affordable air connectivity from Sabarmati Riverfront, Ahmedabad to the Statue of Unity, Kevadia.
SpiceJet started conducting seaplane trials in India in 2017 in Nagpur, Guwahati and Mumbai. It has been exploring air connectivity through water bodies such as rivers or inland waterways. It now already has approval for 18 seaplane routes.
Mainland India’s first seaplane service was actually supposed to be launched in Kerala seven years ago. The service was even launched on 2 June 2013 by then Chief Minister of Kerala Oommen Chandy in the backwaters of the Ashtamudi Lake in Kollam district using a 5+1 seater Cessna 206H amphibian aircraft. But the commercial operations never took off.
However, India’s first commercial seaplane services were launched in Andaman and Nicobar islands way back in 2011. The service named Jal Hans was jointly owned by Pawan Hans and Andaman Nicobar island administration. That service has also used 6 seater Cessna aircraft. Commercial operations continued on a few routes for couple of years. But it stopped. Then again in 2019 another plan was initiated to connect Andaman Islands with a seaplane service under the UDAN scheme of regional connectivity. Incidentally SpiceJet has approval for seaplane services in Andaman islands as well.
There were many private operators as well to start various seaplane services in India at various places in the last decade. But all of them stopped because of commercial unviability. Hopefully, SpiceJet will be able to sustain this service that started in Gujarat on Saturday. It might all depend on the number of fliers it is able to get.