Kolkata: Setting to rest the fears and anxiety of passengers booked on Air India's Kolkata-London fight AI 163 on January 9 and subsequent Sundays, the airline announced on Friday that it will continue to operate this leg of the flight as scheduled. This follows the temporary ban announced by the state government on Thursday on flights from the UK after January 3.
The AI flights from Kolkata to London in January 2022 are almost full with more than 220 seats in the economy class and over 14 seats in the business class booked. With AI flights departing for London from Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Amritsar and Ahmedabad also chock-a-bloc in January, the airline had to dump is plans to reschedule the departure of passengers from Kolkata via these cities and instead, decided to deploy an aircraft to do the one-way flight.
"Initially, we had decided to cancel both AI 163 and AI 164 after the Bengal government announced the ban. But we realized that there are very few seats available on London-bound flights from other cities. Accommodating more than 240 passengers every Sunday in other flights from these cities would have been a logistics nightmare. So, we decided to reinstate AI 163 to continue operating on the Kolkata-London sector," said an airline official. The Boeing Dreamliner B 787 aircraft, on reaching London, will then operate as flight AI 128 from London to Mumbai.
Sources said passengers booked on the London-Kolkata flight would be offered an option to fly to the city via Mumbai or Delhi or any other city. But that would have to be a break journey with passengers alighting in these cities, undergoing Covid test on arrival and then boarding a domestic sector AI flight to Kolkata.
Passengers are relieved at not having to lug their travel bags to other cities and then check them in again before boarding the London-bound flight. Also that would have meant additional complications on rescheduling Covid tests to meet the timeline. "When I learnt about the flight ban on Thursday, I was extremely flustered about how I would return on January 16. Now that AI has assured us that we will be able to fly back directly from Kolkata, it is a huge relief," said a passenger, who lives in Surrey near London and is currently visiting her parents in Behala.
01/01/22 Times of India
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