Low-cost carrier Air Deccan on Friday announced plans to start operations to a number of towns not covered by air services. Steel towns Jamshedpur and Rourkela, and Bodh Gaya, popular with Buddhist pilgrims, are among the destinations.

“The airline will launch services to the new destinations by the end of the year,” said G.R. Gopinath, managing director, Air Deccan.

The airline, which now flies to 19 destinations from the city, will start Calcutta-Jamshedpur-Calcutta operations in three months. Flights to Jorhat, Bodh Gaya, Cooch Behar and Rourkela from the city will be started later.

Air Deccan has recently launched operations to Imphal and Dimapur from Calcutta.

“Calcutta-Jamshedpur is a viable sector, with nearly 1,000 people travelling on the route every day. Bodh Gaya attracts a lot of religious tourists,” said Anil Punjabi, chairman (east), Travel Agents Federation of India.

“We expect good traffic on the new routes, since airlines do not operate on them,” stated Gopinath.

The airline is also planning to make Calcutta a major operational hub. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has allotted it a hangar at the city airport. It had been using the hangars of Indian and Jet Airways.

“We face difficulty in repair and maintenance of our aircraft. One of the hangars was in a dilapidated state and we asked the AAI to hand it over to us,” said Gopinath.

Air Deccan recently shifted to a new database management system and the names of 25,000 passengers were deleted during the switch, leading to confusion, the managing director claimed.