New Delhi-based broker Airluxxis has been pulling out all the stops to educate its customers about safe and hygienic flying during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We wrote and shared videos and infographics with our clients highlighting the way air is circulated inside a aircraft cabin, the presence of HEPA filters, and how aircraft cabins are being sanitised before and after each flight,” explains founder and CEO Mandeep Sandhu. “In addition, our charter managers spoke with clients extensively to dispense these fears. These practices are still ongoing and there is no let-up in our standards and service excellence given that COVID-19 is still around.”

Airluxxis clients have tended to prefer a Citation CJ2 and XLS/Hawker 850/900 for domestic flights over the past 12 months. For the few international flights it carried out, the preference was the G550.

When the lockdown was announced in India in the middle of March 2020, the company received an enquiry from an MNC Bank that needed to ship 75 laptops from Mumbai to a Tier II city, where their call centre was located and the employees did not have access to laptops. “The enquiry came to us at around 1930 and in about two hours we had to figure out the load, as volume may have been an issue not the weight, find a suitable aircraft and ship them early in the morning,” Sandhu explains. “So, from being a business jet charter company, for this one flight we kind of became a mini cargo company. But our team certainly enjoyed supporting the bank, its employees and their cargo.”

He describes the first four months that air travel was halted, as scary: “The cessation of flights coupled with travellers' reluctance to travel was weighing on our minds. However, we kept our resolve and by early August 2020, there was an uptick in the number of enquiries. Every crisis throws up opportunities. Our efforts during the last two quarters of 2020 paid us great dividends. We are now in the phase of expanding our team and offering exclusive short term charter programmes to clients. We plan to take the funding route by the end of 2021 or early 2022 to scale up our operations.”