The Indonesian Charter National Team For Batik Air Aircraft To Vietnam, Is It Worth Billions?

JAKARTA - The All-Indonesian Football Association (PSSI) decided to rent a charter to transport national team players in the second match of the AFF Cup semifinal which will take place at My Dinh Stadium, Hanoi on Monday, January 9.

It was stated that this strategy was taken to increase time efficiency because there was no need to transit flights to arrive at the destination.

"(Hopefully) Players can also have more rest time than using commercial aircraft," PSSI was quoted as saying by the editor on Sunday, January 8.

It is planned that the national team players will immediately hold training in the evening. However, this was canceled because the plane was delayed for 40 minutes so that the opportunity to save time on a chartered plane was in vain.

PSSI's decision to use chartered aircraft is not the only time. It is known that when traveling to the away party to the Philippines, the national team also used charter planes.

The editor then tried to trace what plane was used to Vietnam. From the photo upload by the federation, it is strongly suspected that the fleet rented belonged to Batik Air with the registration code PK-LUK. This is informed from the data tracked on the FlightRadar 24 flight information service provider page.

It was recorded that the Batik Air aircraft used was the Airbus A320 type 200 with flight code ID8840. The plane was taken off from Soekarno-Hatta Airport on Saturday at 13:42 WIB.

The schedule is delayed by about 40 minutes from the initial estimated departure at 13.00 WIB. Meanwhile, Batik Air ID8840 landed at Noi Bai Airport, Hanoi at 18.00 local time.

So if the travel length is calculated, it is 4 hours 18 minutes or occupied for 5 hours (including boarding, taxis and others).

An interesting question emerged, how much did PSSI pay for the aircraft rental?

From monitoring on Batik Air's official website, it is not stated about the overall aircraft rental price for one flight.

However, aviation observer Edwin Soedarmo in 2015 said that the estimated rental price for Lion Air type Boeing 737-900 aircraft was 5,000 to 7,000 US dollars per hour.

Just so you know, the Boeing 737-900 is the same class of aircraft as the Airbus A320200. Even so with Batik Air and Lion Air, which also belongs to the same parent entity, so the operational reference is not much different.

So if you use the assumption that the middle is 6,000 US dollars per hour, then the cost of the Jakarta-Hanoi flight which takes 5 hours will cost you 30,000 US dollars.

If that figure is withdrawn by exchange rate during the 2023 State Budget of Rp. 14,800, then at least PSSI will have to spend as much as Rp. 444 million.

It's finished? Later. This value is the 2015 aircraft rental price with the world oil price benchmark at that time in the range of 35-50 US dollars per barrel. Meanwhile, the current world oil price (average 2022) is at the level of 80-90 US dollars per barrel.

This means that there has been a nearly double increase in aircraft rentals from the initial assumption of Rp444 million to around Rp800 million or close to Rp1 billion for one way for the Indonesian national team to Vietnam. Wow!