A month after Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation added a Boeing 767 aircraft to its three-jet fleet, it seems clueless as to how to use the new addition. The operation plan-or lack thereof-as witnessed on Tuesday, 2 January is a case in point. Passengers bound for Osaka first boarded Royal Nepal's own B757, and at around midnight were asked to deplane and board the B767 leased from Lauda Air. The flight eventually took off about three hours after its scheduled midnight takeoff.

RNAC sources say the problem resulted from the controversial leasing decision, which has failed to address many issues related to day-to-day operation. As the story goes, the B767 reported technical problems after its morning flight in from New Delhi. The scheduled evening flight to Delhi was then passed on to a RNAC B757. After the aircraft came in from Delhi in the evening it was assigned to fly to Osaka. Newspapers reported that this flight to Japan even refuelled with passengers on board after pilots realised just before takeoff that the aircraft did not have enough fuel. (This could not be confirmed independently despite several attempts). Lauda Air then reported it was ready to fly and hence the switch.

Pilots at RNAC say Lauda's operations are co-ordinated from Vienna and the Corporation's operations department has little or no control on the use of the aircraft. The technical snag may have been reported to Vienna and therefore taken a very long time to fix. That's the straightforward explanation though: "When we have no control over operations, how can we use the plane to our benefit?" asks a Royal Nepal pilot.

RNAC said it needed a wide-body jet to expand its flights but so far it has not added any new routes. Instead it has been using the B-767 in routes that were adequately covered by the corporation's two B-757s and one leased B-757. The New Delhi connection has been RNAC's most profitable route but of late-because of the post-hijack publicity and regular bad press in the Indian media-has not had enough passengers even to fill up the smaller B-757s. Presently the leased Lauda aircraft is doing two Osaka flights, one to Frankfurt and one to Singapure.