Akasa Air cancels four Mumbai-Bengaluru flights daily from February 15 to March 30 | Business News – Business Standard
Akasa Air on Tuesday said it will cancel four flights a day between the city and Bengaluru, following government guidelines to ease congestion at Mumbai airport.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation has asked Mumbai airport operator MIAL to reduce the number of scheduled flights and also restrict the operation of private jets for longer hours, reports said.
In a statement, an Akasa Air spokesperson said the network will rationalize with regard to flights operated from Mumbai.
“Airlines’ flight operations to/from Mumbai are expected to be affected due to the implementation of guidelines to reduce runway congestion at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Mumbai.
“…we need to rationalize our network resulting in cancellation of flights QP 1374 and QP 1367 (Mumbai to Bengaluru) and QP 1362 and QP 1366 (Bengaluru to Mumbai) between February 15 and March 30,” the statement said.
The airline will communicate with passengers about the flight cancellations and give them the option to rebook or process a full refund at no additional cost.
Passengers can rebook on any date until April 15, the statement said.
Akasa Air, which is facing a shortage of trained pilots, had canceled 10 flights on February 11 and 12.
On Monday, the airline called the flight cancellations an “anomaly.”
Sources had said on Monday that the airline was facing a shortage of trained pilots due to unavailability of slots for simulator training.
The airline has hired a large number of Airbus pilots from grounded airline Go First, while it has a Boeing aircraft fleet. A pilot must undergo conversion training before switching from one type of aircraft to another, the sources said.
On Monday, Akasa Air chief executive Vinay Dube said the airline is not short of pilots. “Akasa Air is well-staffed with more than 600 pilots, enough to operate more than double the size of our current fleet.”
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: February 13, 2024 | 11:34 PM IST