Air India to operate special Haj flights

Air India would operate 137 special flights from October 20 to facilitate travel of Haj pilgrims to Jeddah and Medina.

The national carrier would additionally operate 117 hub-and-spoke flights to connect passengers to special Haj flights of Saudi Arabian Airlines and NAS Air, a release from Air India said here.

The AI would fly around 40,000 Haj pilgrims on Boeing 747-400, Airbus-310 and Airbus 330 and would also operate 30 extra section flights to meet the requirement.

While the flights to Jeddah and Medina would be operated from Kolkata, Nagpur, Guwahati, Jaipur, Indore, Aurangabad and Srinagar, the hub-and-spoke flights would be from Patna, Ranchi, Varanasi and Mangalore.

Connecting flights to Saudi Arabian services will be from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai and to NAS Air flights from Delhi and Kozhikode, the release said.

Haj flights will be operated from 19 airports in two phases.

While the Phase-I of flying pilgrims to Jeddah and Medina will be from October 20 to November 21, the second phase of flying them back to the country would be during December 1 and January 1, next year, the release said.