	#INTHEAIREVERYWHERE

Vol. 25 No. 35		Thursday August 13, 2026

Quikjet India's Invisible Airline

  Captain Preetham Philip runs an airline most Indians will never notice — and he's fine saying so. "If all my aircraft were grounded tomorrow, nobody would know," says the CEO of Quikjet Cargo Airlines, India's only scheduled all-cargo carrier outside express giant Blue Dart. "A package would arrive three days later. That's all."
  That invisibility, he argues, is the defining feature of Indian air freight: essential to e-commerce, pharma and perishables, yet structurally disadvantaged and poorly understood. After a decade in the business, his verdict is blunt: "Most cargo airline models simply don't work in India."
  The reasons are economic. Unlike Europe or North America, India can truck almost anything. "If I can truck it for two rupees, why send it by air for 80?" Even air's speed edge erodes in handling: a Delhi–Bengaluru shipment eats roughly 12 hours door-to-door against a truck's 36.   "We're a price-sensitive market, not a service-level-sensitive one."
  Passenger carriers compound the squeeze. For an IndiGo or Air India, belly cargo is incremental income; for Philip it's everything. "The belly operator can charge ₹25 a kilo because cargo isn't his business. For me, it's my only revenue." Freight flows are lopsided too — "I can get loads from Delhi to Bengaluru, but maybe not back. Everything is unidirectional" — leaving freighters hunting return payloads passenger routes never have to.
  Philip is notably even-handed on the regulator, reserving his criticism for policy design — schemes such as Krishi Udaan that, he says, miss the airports where farm cargo most needs them. His prescription borrows from China: targeted support that seeds markets until they stand on their own. "If a city grows through aviation, the whole city grows."
  As for the future, his answer is one word: "Drones." He envisages large autonomous freighters carrying one to four tonnes, feeding trunk routes flown by conventional jets and reaching places — Leh, the Himalaya, remote islands — that no timetable can justify today. The technology is coming, he says; the rules will lag and won't be written in India. "If you can go to space and back without a human, why can't you go from one airport to another?"
  Quikjet's own path stays firmly on freight. "Passenger is not something I'll ever get into." The mission is cheaper, broader air cargo built for India's particular geography — and an acceptance that this story will copy no one else's. "If I can make air freight cheaper and accessible to larger volumes," he says, "then everything changes."
Tirthankar Ghosh

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