Air India is big time expanding their network and opening new stations. Air India launched Delhi – San Francisco 3 times a week in December 2015, and then doubled frequency to 6 times a week in November 2016. They started a fifth freedom flight between London and Newark, by launching an Ahmedabad – London – Newark flight. They launched flights to Madrid as well in December 2016 and took over the Delhi – Vienna flights from Austrian. I’d say that is a spectacular show given they are going in all directions.
We earlier wrote about the Air India flight to Washington DC from Delhi. This is going live on 7 July 2017 and is already up for sale on the Air India network. The flight will be 3x per week to start with. Like I wrote last, the airline was planning flights to Dallas and Los Angeles as well, apart from other stations in Europe such as a Mumbai – Frankfurt as well.
Back in the day, Air India had confirmed it was looking at launching a flight to Copenhagen in Denmark from Delhi. They essentially wanted to open flights to the Nordics and were in a toss up between Stockholm and Copenhagen. Then, we heard no more or the plan to CPH till a few days ago and it was all about Stockholm. Now, the airline has announced they will launch their scheduled flights to both the airports.
To Stockholm Arlanda, the airline starts their service on 16 August 2017. They have friends there in SAS Scandinavian Airlines who are fellow Star Alliance members.
AI167 DEL1400 – 1820ARN 788 357
AI168 ARN2105 – 0745+1DEL 788 357
For Copenhagen, the airline has confirmed in a Facebook post that they will fly thrice a week to CPH from September 16, 2017. This will be their 11th destination in Europe. The airline also mentioned if they hit 37,500 pax each way, they would convert this flight to a daily service.
The details of the flight are:
AI157 DEL1410 – 1850CPH 788 246
AI158 CPH2035 – 0745+1DEL 788 246
It seems to me the airline is going to rotate the same equipment on both the routes, and this works out well for them opening two stations with one new plane. I am not sure how it works for them since I haven’t flown their international network much after the merger, but AI gets to do this a lot, such as on Melbourne/Sydney, Rome/Milan and even Vienna/Madrid which rotate 3x a week.
Ultimately, I hope Air India is successful on these routes and we see more direct flights from their stable shortly! Both these flights are open for booking right now!
Why is it all about DEL? I’m no expert but BOM could also have good traffic if given an opportunity.
I agree.
However, slots are very hard to come by here in BOM and also AI has decided to hub DEL rather than BOM as earlier…
*Maybe* the Danish Ambassador will get good service on board – but the problem is that the rest of us will not!
Plus, for us in BOM, it’s not that great – but still a 2-stop solution.
Problem is that it is:
1. AI. (Notorious for hopeless service/equipment/reliability – nobody wants to be stranded in DEL or CPH…)
2. No daily flights, so with IRROPS and potentially clueless representatives to rebook one on *A carriers, there will hardly be any recourse/options for us!