Nepal Airline Corporation’s second wide-body aircraft has arrived in Nepal. The A330-200 with registration ‘9N-ALZ’ is named ‘Makalu’.The first wide-body had arrived on June 28. The aircraft has since flown to New Delhi on its maiden proofing flight and is all set to oper­ate commercial flights to Qatar starting August 1.

 

The general manager of NAC Sugat Ratna Kansakar along with his team had flown to Toulouse, France for the purchase of the sec­ond aircraft.

 

This new aircraft has 272 seats, just like the first one, out of which 18 are business class and 256 are economy class seats.

 

These two wide-body aircrafts were purchased via a loan of Rs 12 billion from the Employees Provi­dent Fund and the Citizen Invest­ment Trust, with guarantee from Nepal Government. Each aircraft cost around $105 million.

 

The corporation believes these two aircraft will help make ‘Visit Nepal 2020’ a grand success. It has also made public its commercial plan of increasing its international flight market share from the cur­rent 9 percent to 17 percent.

 

Makalu plans to fly to des­tinations in Europe, the US, Japan and South Korea. In the first stage, it will fly to Japan, Korea and Saudi Arabia. NAC plans to provide direct flights to the US and Europe when it purchases a third aircraft.