Indonesia: Indonesia suspends three Lion Air route licenses

The Indonesian Transportation Ministry (ITM) has suspended three Lion Air route licenses and has reprimanded the Indonesian low-cost carrier. The action came after both Lion Air and Batik Air had failed to operate flights on certain routes for 21 consecutive days. The three routes, from Jakarta to Surabaya, Medan and Pontianak, had been allocated to Lion Air and its subsidiary Batik Air. The ministry’s air transportation directorate inspectors carried out investigations, which verified that both Lion and Batik had committed contraventions of permit conditions, ITM spokesperson Muzaffar Ismail said. Ismail said the carriers’ standard operating procedure for delay management and implementation is currently at 60% of the target level, which he described as “very low.” “We will revoke a flight route permit of an airline company if it does not use the permit for 21 days at a stretch,” Ismail said. The ministry, which has previously said it will apply regulations more stringently if domestic carriers do not fulfill license requirements, said it would consider further sanctions against Lion Group if it did not improve management of all sanctioned routes. The ITM said the carriers would be given three months to rectify the contraventions, but if they did not satisfy inspectors the issues had been addressed, the likelihood of withdrawing their business license was real.<br/>