Alliance Air to fly from India to Nepal, Bangladesh

After going international with its first flight taking off to Jaffna from Chennai on Thursday, state-owned regional airline, Alliance Air, has drawn an elaborate plan to launch more international flights to neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh from Indian cities.

The first international flight, ATR 72-600, took off from Chennai at 8.45 am on Thursday to Jaffna, the capital of the Tamil-dominated northern province in Sri Lanka, re-establishing the old air links between the two close neighbours. Alliance Air will be the first international airline to land at the Jaffna International Airport, which is being inaugurated on Thursday.

Alliance Air, a subsidiary of Air India, connects 54 cities, most of which are new airports that became operational after the government’s ambitious UDAN scheme came into effects in the country and plans to launch flights to Chittagong and Kathmandu in the next few months.

“Since we have gone international now, we are looking at connecting cities of neighbouring countries from Kolkata, Varanasi and Guwahati. We plan to launch a few services within this year,” Air India Chairman and Managing Director Ashwani Lohani told a select group of journalists here.

Since the ATR flights can fly up to 2.5 hours, the Alliance Air is looking at cities that can be reached by air in about the aforesaid time from Indian towns and cities. Alliance Air Chief Executive Officer C S Subbiah said the airline was looking at connecting Varanasi with Kathmandu and Kolkata with Chittagong to begin with.

“Alliance Air and Air India is proud of re-establishing an old historical link and since this is the regional airline’s first foray outside India, we are happy about going international. We want to continue this momentum and launch more such flights as many Indian cities and cities in neighbouring countries are quite close,” Lohani said.

The airline also plans to launch more flights to Jaffna from other Indian cities, especially those in Tamil Nadu, and launch daily services to Trincomalee in Eastern Sri Lanka, which is also a Tamil-dominated province. “We have plans to launch flights from Tiruchirappalli and Madurai to Jaffna, besides a daily service from Chennai to Trincomalee. We hope that the Chennai-Trincomalee air service would begin in about a month’s time,” Subbiah said.

On the domestic sector, the airline plans to launch flights from Gulbarga to Bengaluru, Hubli to Hyderabad and Hyderabad to Jagadalpur in November.