The third phase of Air India Express (AIE)’s Vande Bharat Mission to evacuate stranded Indians from West Asia and southeast Asian countries will commence on June 9.
The services, which will be on till June 23, will begin with the IX 1181 flight which will leave Abu Dhabi at 10.45 a.m. and reach the Cochin international airport at 4.10 p.m. on June 9. The AIE will operate flights from Doha to Thiruvananthapuram and Kannur, Dubai to Kozhikode, and Kuwait to Kozhikode that day.
The AIE will operate 107 flights to various airports in the country in the third phase. Forty-two flights will operate to the four airports in Kerala. There will be flights to the State on all days except June 22. There will be more flights from Singapore and Malaysia, according to airline sources.
Fourteen AIE repatriation flights will land at the Thiruvananthapuram international airport, 13 in Cochin, 10 in Kozhikode, and five in Kannur. In addition, the AIE will fly to Chennai, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Mangaluru, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Lucknow, Delhi and Amritsar.
The airline will deploy over 20 Boeing 737-800 NG aircraft for the operations. The AIE had operated 22 repatriation flights in Phase I, 38 in Phase II, and 95 in Phase II plus of the Vande Bharat Mission that ended on June 4. The third phase begins against the backdrop of nine crew members on flights to Kerala testing positive for COVID-19.
300 flights
In addition to the AIE flights, Air India will operate around 300 flights to Europe, Australia, Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Africa between June 10 and July 1 during Phase III. Between May 7 and June 1, the Air India group has operated 423 inbound international flights bringing 58,867 Indian citizens back to the country.
