KOCHI: Amid the Centre’s plans to resume scheduled commercial international flights from Sunday, the Cochin International Airport Ltd (Cial) announced its summer schedule on Tuesday. In the summer schedule, Cial India’s third busiest airport in the international sector will have around 1,190 flight operations weekly compared to 848 weekly operations in the ongoing winter schedule.
The summer schedule will be operational till October 29. There will be 20 airlines operating to destinations abroad. Out of them, 16 airlines are international carriers. There will be 261 each weekly departures and arrivals. IndiGo topped the list with 42 weekly departures to international destinations whereas Air India express will have 38 departure operations weekly.
Air India Express (38), AirAsia Berhad (21), Ethihad (21), Emirates (14), Oman Air (14), Qatar Air (14), Saudi Arabian Airlines (14), Kuwait Air (8), Thai Air Asia (4), SriLankan Airlines (10), Gulf Air (7), Fly Dubai (3) Singapore Airlines (7) and SpiceJet (6) are other prominent carriers operating services. There will be 44 weekly departures from Kochi to Dubai alone, whereas Abu Dhabi comes second with 42 operations.
Air India will continue its three weekly operations to London and Thai Air Asia will resume its operations from Kochi in June, with four direct flights to Bangkok weekly. After a hiatus of two years, AirAsia Berhad will also have daily services to Kuala Lumpur. Cial schedules 668 domestic operations for the summer schedule offering connectivity with 13 cities in the country. There will be 63 weekly flights to Delhi, 55 to Mumbai, 39 to Hyderabad, 49 to Chennai, 79 to Bengaluru and 7 to Kolkata. There will be daily flights to Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Mysuru, Kannur, Hubli, Agati and Ahmedabad.
Cial managing director S Suhas said that Cial chairman Pinarayi Vijayan and the board of directors have been consistently putting in efforts to increase the connectivity from Kochi.
