Pokhara, Jan. 29:Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation (RNAC) is operating scheduled flights to south Indian city of Bangalore beginning March this year adding one more Indian destination in its already existing list of three.

The national flag carrier chose to declare its newly added scheduled flight in the presence of above 260 foreign and international tour operators gathered here to participate in the 12th Pacific Asia Travel Association’s (PATA) Eco-tourism conference and travel mart that kicked off in this tourist hub, yesterday.

“Since the Indian tourists comprise of 30 per cent of the total inbound tourists, we have decided to fly into one more Indian city”, Ananda Acharya, Schedule In-Charge with RNAC, told reporters her this evening. Of the little above 460,000 inbound tourists in 1998, above 143,000 were Indians topping the list of foreign tourists in Nepal.

The additional flight, scheduled to fly on Sundays and Wednesdays at four p.m., will take two and a half hours to directly reach Banglore from where it will fly back to Kathmandu at 7:15 p.m.

The national flag carrier will tentatively charge Rupees 10,000 Indian Currency for two-way ticket per-head. “The rate will be keep in test for two months,” said Acharya.

RNAC has a booth in the ongoing PATA mart here from where its employees will disseminate the new-route information to tourism professionals who have gathered here from around the globe.

It’s flight-operation to Banglore begins around the same time when RNAC’s leased Boeing 757 belonging to China Southwest Airlines will fly back upon the expiry of its lease-period.

Since it will be left with only two of it’s Boeing 757s once the leased aircraft goes back, the national airline has already called for global tender to lease a Boeing 767 300ER for at least two years. RNAC officials claim if all goes well, the type of air craft it has sought for will fly in timely.

“The presumption is the third aircraft will be here to begin its operations including the latest added route,” said Acharya.

The state-airline with three planes in its fleet-two of its own and the third one leased — has been covering 12 international destinations. Apart from the three Indian cities — New Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta — it has been flying to, RNAC has been operating as far as London in the west and to Osaka, Japan in the east.

The new Indian-route in RNAC’s list comes at a time when Nepal is yet to make optimum utilisation of its 6,000 air seats (one-way) per week to India under the Air Service Agreement it signed with the southern neighbour some two years ago. Before that, when the country had only 4,000 air-seats per week to fly to and from India, travel trade grossly complained about the bottleneck of tourist arrivals from Indian cities, particularly New Delhi.