COVID-19: Air India to truncate international flight operations

New Delhi: In the wake of the deadly coronavirus outbreak across the world, national carrier Air India has decided to truncate its flight operations to Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid and Tel Aviv from March 15-18 till April 28-30, the airline tweeted on Friday.

IANS, citing sources, had reported a day earlier that such a move is being contemplated by the airline.

“Operations on Delhi-Frankfurt, Mumbai-Frankfurt, Delhi-Paris, and other sectors in Europe might get truncated,” sources had told IANS on Thursday.

Besides, Air India on Friday tweeted that it is also curtailing its operations to Colombo and suspending operations to Kuwait till April 30, 2020.

The airline has already suspended operations on Delhi-Seoul route till March 25 and Delhi-Rome and Delhi-Milan routes till March 28.

The airline had on March 9 said that in accordance with the circular of the Director General of Civil Aviation, in addition to visa restrictions already in place, passengers travelling from or having visited Italy or South Korea and entering India will need a certificate of negative test for COVID-19 from labs authorised by these countries.

Earlier, Air India had cancelled flights to Shanghai from January 31 to February 14 and to Hong Kong from February 7 until March 28. Air India last month extended the suspension of Delhi-Shanghai and Delhi-Hong Kong services till June 30.

(IANS)