Early last week, Indian authorities announced the resumption of domestic flights in India, with several safeguard measures in place. Ticketing opened yesterday and is going strong. One of the assurances given to everyone at the time of relaunching flights by the ministry was that there would be one India one policy and people won’t have to fear getting locked down in the other state with a quarantine.
Subsequently, various states started to bring up their own rules, many of whom want to quarantine people on arrival into the state. Maharashtra’s initial stance was that they won’t allow the Mumbai airport to open at all. For the whole of Sunday, the question everyone asked was, “Is domestic flights running in Mumbai?” It was a top trending query on Google too!
Late evening, climbing down from their original stance, the state will allow Mumbai Airport to resume operations from May 25, 2020, onwards. However, the scale of operations will be limited, and Mumbai will allow 25 arrivals and 25 departures on a daily basis. However, all other airports of Maharashtra will resume one-third operations from May 25 onwards.
For the attention of all passengers flying through #MumbaiAirport#ImportantAnnouncement #CSMIA #CSMIACombatsCovid19 #CoronaVirus@AAI_Official @MoCA_GoI @MoHFW_INDIA @DGCAIndia @my_bmc pic.twitter.com/omYiko9vdR
— CSMIA (@CSMIA_Official) May 24, 2020
This clears up the air a lot but would put the plans of a lot of people in disarray. Apparently Mumbai-destined flights got a good response in an initial couple of days of bookings and now airlines and passengers will see more confusion and cancellations. To take the fate of one of the easiest airlines to track, Vistara had initially planned for 2 DEL-BOM flights on May 25, 2020, and now has had to cancel both of them and put a third flight number in place because of the whole chaos till the last minute.
All the flights, for now, will operate out of Mumbai Airport Terminal 2, so plan accordingly.
Check your flight schedules till the moment you leave from home, because who knows if your flight is operating or not, eventually.
Supreme Court said today, commenting that it was “common sense” that social distancing is important as a precaution against coronavirus.
The court also noted that the government should be more worried about the health of citizens rather than the health of commercial airlines.
Got trips planned to India in January. Great to see things opening up again.