A government official reports that Indian flights will resume on Sunday for the first time in two years because of a world-wide epidemic affecting the aviation industry. Scheduled Foreign Carriers is now open. The summer schedule 2022 will go into effect on March 27 and will end October 29, 2022.
India is restarting international flights with a gap of two years. The move comes amid widening vaccine coverage, and it’s the country’s way of adapting to the world hit by the pandemic. The aviation industry has faced many setbacks, with many new variants leading to the resurgence of Covid cases over the last two years. France, Germany, Italy, China and Japan have also been dealt blows from fresh waves this month. India hasn’t experienced any resurgence in cases since a wave powered by Omicron in January.
60 other airlines will be entering the Indian market with some of them already taking off. From the US, Malaysia and Turkey to Mauritius, Thailand, Iraq and others approved for 1783 frequencies in the next schedule.
New airlines that have recently started operations in India are Salam Air, Air Arabia Abu Dhabi, Qantas and American Airlines.
Earlier this month, Indian Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia reported that air traffic was almost back to pre-Covid levels. The number of passengers declined to 160,000 per day in wave 3 from the pre-Covid level of 400,000 and post Covid-2 level of 383,000; but since Covid came back, we reached around 380,000 passengers per day,’ Jyotiraditya Scindia said.
The aviation industry has faced losses due to high fuel prices, the owner of Covid said. “Fuel prices have gone up. I can just point out that in 2020, before Covid, aviation turbine fuel (ATF) was close to about ₹21,000 per kilo litre and today, it is ₹93,000 per kilo litre. So fuel prices themselves have gone up by close to 4.5 times. This is a very important issue for us,” Jyotiraditya Scindia said.
