Air India is one of three airlines to serve the Delhi – London market alongside British Airways, Jet Airways and Virgin Atlantic Airways and which together will offer a total of seven daily flights from this winter – Air India three, British Airways two and Jet Airways and Virgin Atlantic Airways with single daily rotations.
The new route will complement the carrier’s existing US network of Newark Liberty, New York JFK and Chicago O’Hare and will be its longest non-stop service at a distance of around 7,670 miles and a 16 hour flight time. It will be served by a Boeing 777-200LR and will operate on a three times weekly basis from December 2, 2015.
British Airways has announced it will introduce its first Boeing 787-9 into its fleet in September 2015 and will initially deploy the larger Dreamliner variant on its route between London Heathrow and Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India from the start of the winter 2015/2016 schedule in late October.
The state-run airline has proposed to fly three weekly flights each to San Francisco and Toronto from New Delhi with a Boeing 777-200LR aircraft, which is likely to be reconfigured to include more seating capacity, the airline has said.
The four-times-weekly link will commence on May 17, 2015 and will be the only direct service between the two cities, taking over from the current Delhi – Sydney – Melbourne triangular flight, which the airline currently operates.
The new Toronto - Delhi link is an example of a route made possible thanks to the excellent operating economics that modern generation airliners now offer and certainly would not have been able to be served on a sustainable manner using older aircraft types.
Delivering on a brand promise of “a world class flying experience” Vistara is the first full service carrier in India to introduce a ‘Premium Economy’ class to the domestic market. It will configure its A320s in a 148-seat arrangement with 16 seats in Business Class, 36 in Premium Economy and 96 in Economy Class.
The start-up has bold ambitions to set a new industry benchmark for others to follow in India. It will initially launch operations from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport serving a mixture of metros and non-metros markets where there is a clear demand for a full-service carrier.
Since launching flights on the Amritsar - Delhi - Birmingham route on a four times weekly schedule on August 1, 2013, the carrier has handled more than eighty thousand passengers onboard 210 return flights, providing better connectivity between the Midlands and India for business passengers, tourists and people visiting friends and relatives.
Our data analysis shows that bi-directional O&D demand between Nigeria and India has seen an average annual growth of 25.3 per cent over the past ten years as traffic has more than trebled from around 46,000 passengers in 2004 to just under 150,000 in 2013.
Building on the momentum from last year, when 17 new destinations where added to the network, the airline has further cemented its commitment to enhance connectivity between different cultures.
