Air India has been spending a lot of effort bringing planes back in the air from grounding, leasing planes to increase capacity, and adding capacity to existing routes or adding more flights to routes that used to be served in the past. One of their modes of expansion into the UK has been to operate flights into London Gatwick while they continue to try to add flights to London Heathrow.
Air India will launch a non-stop flight between Bengaluru and London Gatwick four times weekly.
As reported by LiveFromALounge earlier, Air India has now started displaying the schedule for its flight between Bengaluru and London Gatwick. There are minor modifications to the earlier plan, though. Instead of the earlier expected April 1, 2024, the flight will now operate as of May 1, 2024.
The airline will deploy a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft with four weekly flights to serve the BLR-LGW sector instead of the five flights previously anticipated. Here is the planned schedule,
AI177 BLR 14:05-20:05 LGW
AI178 LGW 21:35-11:50 (+1) BLR
Unlike the earlier five-days-a-week plan, the flights will operate on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. It is imperative to note that even pre-privatisation, Bengaluru – London was a city pair offered by Air India, except it was between Bengaluru and London Heathrow in 2018. The flight numbers assigned to the BLR – LGW flights are the same as the BLR – LHR rotation back in the day. The route is still not announced formally by Air India and is not open for reservation on the Air India website.
Bottomline
Air India plans to expand at London Gatwick and will start with a new flight between Bengaluru and London Gatwick in May 2024. The airline operated flights between Bengaluru and London Heathrow in the past, and the same flight numbers will be transferred to this flight.
What do you think of Air India’s planning to launch flights between Bengaluru and London Gatwick?
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Hey Ajay!
Given that we haven’t heard any official announcement yet by AI, do you have an idea on what’s happening?
Given the announcement of BLR as a Hub, I’d still hope that they launch the route soon, but puzzled by the lack of any announcement.
Cheers,
Utkarsh
It should’ve been London Heathrow and not Gatwick. Further the flight timming should always be such that passengers should get connecting Air India domestic flights to & from Bangalore
@S Kamath, you are asking for a unicorn, honestly. LHR is slot-limited, and almost every airline around the globe wants to operate flights to LHR. So, you can imagine slots are hard to get and sold in millions of dollars. As for the time of arrival, Gatwick would mostly be for O&D traffic, so not for people who want to connect further from London anyways.
Why don’t AI should start 3 day a week or 4 day a week from southern gate way of india Chennai to London Gatwick where many tamil people leave there much convenient for them when there is only one airlines is serving between these two cities which is British airways, Air India should consider this .
@Prahlad, operating a route is a function of aircraft availability, route economics, etc. Eventually, I imagine this route will come, but for now, it seems Chennai does not have enough traffic for Europe as a whole (Air France is pulling out of Chennai as well).
Great news