Air India would operate several extra flights to London, Frankfurt and Chicago from Sunday to take home passengers stranded at various airports due to the week-long closure of European airspace caused by volcanic ash from Iceland.
The national carrier, which has been flying additional flights to clear the backlog, would operate a Mumbai-London-Delhi flight with a Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft on Sunday and a Delhi-London-Mumbai service on Monday.
Similarly, it would operate an additional service on the Mumbai-Hyderabad-Frankfurt-Chicago route on Wednesday and its return flight, an airline spokesperson said.
The closure of airspace had resulted in seven planes of Air India getting stuck at various airports across the globe during the week. While two each remained parked at London and New York, one each were stranded at Frankfurt, Newark and
Chicago.
The operating crew of these planes had also remained stranded at these airports for almost a week.
With focus on retrieving these planes and crew soon after the European airspace opened, the aircraft from Chicago was brought to India via Cairo, which was a technical halt for refuelling.
Notwithstanding low loads on the return sectors from Europe, the airline continued its operations, the spokesperson said.
Non-stop flights to the US were operated through the Egyptian capital, instead of passing through its European hub in Frankfurt. This, he said, was done to avoid the payload penalty caused by the need to uplift extra fuel of nearly 19 tonnes on the non-stop flights.
As a result on one occasion, passengers booked on the Chicago flight to Delhi from Frankfurt were put on other airlines like Lufthansa or accommodated in next day's terminator flight on the Delhi-Frankfurt-Delhi sector. These terminator services from Frankfurt were never cancelled after the airspace opened up, he said.
The technical halt at Cairo lasted four days from April 19 to 22.