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Air India will resume direct flights to Tel Aviv from March 2, after suspending the services in August last year amid tensions in the Middle East. Five weekly flights will be operated from the national capital to Tel Aviv in Israel, the airline said in a release on Wednesday. The airline will deploy its Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft having 18 flat beds in Business Class and 238 seats in Economy Class on the route. The non-stop flights will be operated on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. Thursdays and Sundays. The decision to resume operations on the Delhi-Tel Aviv route follows the requisite approvals, the release said. In August 2024, the airline had suspended the direct flights in view of the escalating tensions between Israel and Iran. On Tuesday, Israel's tourism minister Haim Katz said he was pushing for direct flight from Mumbai to Tel Aviv by Air India and Israeli airline EI AI.
Air India will see most of the air traffic growth coming from domestic and short-haul international operations in 2025 as more narrow-body planes are joining the fleet and legacy wide-body aircraft will be going for retrofit next year, the airline's chief Campbell Wilson said on Thursday. The Tata Group-owned airline, which has embarked on a five-year transformation journey, expects to have a fleet of 400 planes by 2027. Currently, the total fleet strength of Air India Group, including Air India Express, is around 300 aircraft. During a select media briefing, Wilson, who has been at the helm of Air India for more than two years, said the airline group has a domestic market share of around 29 per cent and 55 per cent on the metro to metro routes. On top 120 domestic routes, the market share is about 40 per cent, he said. According to him, the retrofit of legacy wide-body aircraft will start in early 2025. "We had hoped to start retrofit of 787s and 777s by now. Unfortunately, the
Akasa Air is well on the path to profitability and will fly to more international destinations, including in South Asia and Southeast Asia, according to its Co-Founder Aditya Ghosh. In less than two years of taking to the skies, Akasa Air has a fleet of 24 planes and has more than 4,000 employees. In an interview to PTI in the national capital, Ghosh, who has donned multiple and diverse roles during his career, said that airlines are becoming more of a consumption story in India. "We will increasingly see it as consumer-focused businesses where the learnings which are there from ecommerce companies will help us address the needs and behaviour of consumers better in the transportation business," he said. Among other roles, he had served as IndiGo's President and Whole Time Director for ten years till 2018. When a customer-focused and employee-centric organisation is being built, it is also important to build a financially sustainable business, Ghosh said and emphasised that Akasa A
Air Vanuatu filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday a day after the South Pacific state-owned carrier cancelled all international flights, stranding thousands of travellers. The airline on Wednesday cancelled more than 20 flights to and from the Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane, and the New Zealand city of Auckland for the rest of the week. The airline said it was the result of extended maintenance requirements on their aircraft. Ernst & Young Australia's Morgan Kelly, Justin Walsh and Andrew Hanson were appointed liquidators in an equivalent of a US Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the firm said in a statement. The liquidators said safety and maintenance checks would be made before normal operations resumed. Kelly said the airline's existing management team would remain in place. Air Vanuatu is critical to the people of the Republic of Vanuatu and a strategically important business to the nation, Kelly said. Our team is working closely with management to ensure continuity of ...