Air India will operate special domestic flights from different cities between May 19 and June 2 to help passengers stranded across the country reach home. Passengers must pay for the seats for which bookings were yet to begin.
A majority of the flights are from Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. Chennai will have one flight: Kochi-Chennai on May 19. Delhi will have 173 flights, Mumbai 40, Hyderabad 25, and Kochi 12.
Flights from Delhi will be operated to Jaipur, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Amritsar, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Vijayawada, Gaya, Lucknow, and a few other cities. Air India will operate flights from Mumbai to Visakhapatnam, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Vijayawada. There are also flights from Hyderabad to Mumbai, Delhi and back. Bengaluru will have flights to Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad and an incoming flight from Bhubaneswar.
A senior AI official said the schedule is ready. “We are waiting for a nod from the ministry of civil aviation. The schedule has been prepared as part of phase-2 of evacuation flights to bring Indians from abroad. The government had said that domestic flights too could be included in the second schedule,” he said. Schedule for some of these flights has been designed to ensure that passengers arriving from abroad on rescue flights can fly to their home states. “But that will also depend on quarantine rules,” an official said, adding that the operation was scheduled to start on May 15 but was postponed to 17.
“Now it has been decided to start on May 19. The commencement will depend on the ministry’s approval. But this will be a forerunner to start domestic operations in a phased manner,” he said.
People will have to book through the airline site soon after a notification is released. A senior official of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said preparations were on to handle domestic flights because there is a hint that private airlines may be allowed to operate more flights from Chennai.
Sriharan Balan of Madura Travels said, “The domestic points included in phase-2 of repatriation flights will be of help for several people who are waiting to travel home. We were trying for charter flights and airlines had said that they will ferry people on domestic routes if there are a sufficient number of passengers. The registration shows that hundreds of people want to fly from Chennai to Mumbai and Delhi and other cities.”
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