Kathmandu: The government has planned to remove the service diesel ramp bus from the terminal building inside the Tribhuvan Airport to the aircraft and to the terminal building after landing.
It is now planned to be replaced by an electric bus. Accordingly, NEA has also sent letters to all the airlines.
The letter states that diesel buses will be removed and replaced by electric buses. The NEA has written to the companies to disclose the pollution measurement of the existing buses, the number of seats in each vehicle, the year of purchase and the type of vehicle.
The airline operators have been sold out of the NEA’s plan. The companies say that it will be impossible to implement the plan to put additional burden on the airlines which have not been able to recover from the epidemic of corona virus.
Captain Rameshwar Thapa, president of the Association of Airlines Operators, said that the airlines that lost more than Rs 17.50 billion in the Corona epidemic could not bring new buses by spending crores.
He said that there has been an attempt to run the bus from the private sector instead of the ramp bus operated by the airline company and he has suspected that it will be the same this time as well. According to him, NEA had tried to involve the private sector to operate buses inside the airport in 2060 BS. At the time, the work was halted after strong protests from the airline.
According to the Airline Operators Association, most domestic airlines now use their own buses to transport passengers from terminals to airplanes. In international flights, the Nepal Airlines Corporation has taken charge of it.
According to Ion, the ramp bus and other vehicles operating at the air side have fully complied with the pollution standards set by the Department of Transport Management and third party insurance has also been provided. The plan to replace diesel buses has also drawn attention to the fact that these buses will become unusable and the airline’s multi-million dollar investment will sink again.