Air India has plans to start a Kolkata-London direct flight from 2017

Air India has plans to restart the Kolkata-London direct flight with a Dreamliner flight by mid-2017. Once it starts, it would be six years after Lufthansa snapped the city's last Europe link. It may be recalled that Air India had withdrawn its Calcutta-London flight in October 2008. Subsequently, next year, British Airways pulled out from the city followed by German airline Lufthansa - it was Calcutta's last direct connection to Europe and it withdrew its Frankfurt flight in 2010.
This has been reported in telegraphindia.com dated 5 August 2016.

For any airline to operate on a new route, it has to plan at least a year in advance. It has to take into consideration various factors like a market survey, apart from requests for landing and parking slots at both destinations. Foreign airlines had left Calcutta because of inadequate load. Calcutta did not provide enough business for operations to remain viable and, usually, profitability is defined by demand for high-yield seats.
Anyway, for any airline to operate on a new route, it has to plan a year in advance, starting with a market survey and requests for landing and parking slots at both destinations.The tentative plan appears to be to start a Dhaka-Calcutta-London flight. It can hopefully be launched by the middle of next year with a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. The flight would possibly operate non-stop between Calcutta and Heathrow, where the national airline operates from Terminal 4. It would probably be restricted to a maximum of one flight in this sector.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org


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