Jet Airways History

Jet Airways is one of India’s premier private airlines. It was incorporated as an ‘air taxi’ operator on April 1, 1992. Jet Airways started its commercial airline operations on 5 May 1993 with a fleet of four leased Boeing 737-300 aircrafts and 24 daily flights serving 12 destinations. In January 1994 a change in the law enabled Jet Airways to apply for scheduled airline status, which was granted on 4 January 1995. It began international operations to Sri Lanka in March 2004 with inaugural flight from Chennai to Colombo.

Jet Airways was set up by Naresh Goyal, who owned Jetair Private Limited which provided sales and marketing for foreign airlines in India. Jet Airways was started as a full-service scheduled airline that would give competition to state-owned Indian Airlines, who had enjoyed monopoly in the domestic market since 1953. Jet Airways acquired its scheduled airline status in January 1994, when the Air Corporations Act (1953) was repealed.

In January 2006, Jet Airways announced its decision to buy Air Sahara, the only other major private airline, making it the biggest takeover in Indian aviation history. The resulting airline would have been the country's largest, but the deal fell through in June 2006. However, a modified deal went through in April 2007 and Air Sahara became JetLite. In August 2008, the airline announced its plans to fully integrate JetLite into Jet Airways.

Further, in October 2008, Jet Airways announced an alliance with Kingfisher Airlines that included an agreement on code-sharing on domestic and international flights, common ground handling, join fuel management, join utilisation of crew and sharing of similar frequent flier programmes. In May 2009, Jet Airways introduced another low-cost airline Jet Konnect with spare aircraft that were earlier discontinued due to low passenger load factors. Jet Airways Konnect uses the same operator code as Jet Airways.