India-UK flights to resume from January 8, says Civil Aviation Minister

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 1

The government on Friday announced that it has decided to resume partial passenger flight services between India and the UK from January 8 onwards.

Announcing this, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Friday said, “It has been decided that flights between India and UK will resume from January 8, 2021. Operations till 23 Jan will be restricted to 15 flights per week each for carriers of the two countries to and from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad only.”

The Civil Aviation Ministry had last week suspended all flights between that country and India from December 23 to December 31 over the mutated variant of the virus. The suspension was further extended till January 7 to prevent the spread of a new strain of the virus, considered to be much more infectious.

However, there was heavy demand from the air-passengers to resume operation between the two countries. Before the temporary suspension came into effect, over 60 flights a week were carrying almost 2,500 passengers a day.

Airlines like Air India, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, and Vistara operated over 60 weekly flights between the two countries from Indian cities like Chenna, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, apart from Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Currently, normal international scheduled commercial flights remain suspended at least till 31 January.

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