While Jet Airways took the lead in a airfare war, giving out tickets for Rs 2,240 on Monday, and low-cost airlines IndiGo, SpiJet and Go Air joined the race within hours, Kingfisher Airlines is on a different — and an equally surprising and shocking — tangent. The airline, according to PTI reports, has started paying salaries to its employees.

While rumours of hospitalisation of some super-shocked employees and their immediate discharge following gossips of another month’s salary could not be confirmed, it has emerged that Vijay Mallya, who owns the airline that has got nothing to do with air, unless you consider airtime on TV debates to be part of the air sliced through by the wings of a Kingfisher airline, has got a new idea: it’s called flight of fancy. He plans to actually revive the airline.

While the plans were met with raised eyebrows and a zillion exclamation marks by all concerned, especially passengers relishing some air tickets at decent prices for months since Mallya’s dreamliner nose-dived and long before Air India grounded its own set of six Boeing Dreamliners, the UB Group chairman is learnt to be hoarding and boarding new dreams while the plans do their bit of taxiing.

So, as Kingfisher chief executive Sanjay Agarwal reached New Delhi to meet the directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) to make a fresh request to resume operations, as PTI reports, Mallya went back to the drawing board to revive his revival plans, as no one reports. He is learnt to be drawing sketches on that very same drawing board for his next round of Kingfisher calendar.

Sources close to the drawing board said the calendars are meant solely for Mallya to tick off dates on which the airline cannot be resumed in 2013. So far he is learnt to have ticked off all the remaining days in the calendar year, and is allegedly asking more models to pose for a fresh calendar to resume the activity afresh.

In a bid to take on the rival airlines, the Kingfisher promoter is even considering entering the fare fray to ensure it is not an unfair fracas, said sources close to the wall on which the calendar was hung. He is learnt to be toying with the idea of reducing the calendar’s price to an all-encompassing Rs 2,240.

And since nothing from either Kingfisher or the king of good times comes without a surprise freebie, buyers of the calendar might also get a discounted return fare: Rs 1,000 off on next year’s calendar.

Meanwhile, DGCA, the civil aviation regulator, is toying with the idea of issuing Kingfisher Airline and all its top honchos a special licence to dream, according to sources close to the water where all this king-size fishing in troubled waters is taking place.

Disclaimer: No part of this report, barring the words immediately preceding the letters P, T and I are authenticated.