Oman Air launches Dubai-Kochi flight

The inaugural flight of the first foreign scheduled airline to fly to Kochi from Dubai took off from the tarmac last night with a fully-booked load.

Oman Air were granted the traffic rights for the route via Muscat following bilateral discussions between Civil Aviation Depart-ments of the Sultanate of Oman and the Republic of India earlier this month, and will commence operations with an initial thrice-weekly service.

The 600 seat per-week agreement from Dubai is additional to 400 extra seats being deployed between Oman, Mumbai and Chennai per-week. Aircraft servicing the route are Airbus A310-325s and A320s. Vernon Rebello, Oman Air's Marketing Officer for the UAE, described the move as "a great achievement for the airline," which also operates five flights a week to Trivandrum.

He said: "Both ourselves and our customers have been waiting for this for a very long time and we've had an excellent market response with our first two flights which are already fully booked."

The flights, which outbound leave Dubai on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, will depart at 22.15 and will arrive in Muscat at 23.05 for an overnight connection to Kochi, arriving 05.40 local time.

Total flight duration is estimated at four hours, 20 minutes. Inbound travel to Dubai will be available on Monday's, Wednesday's and Friday's - with an extra service per week starting in September.

"We are providing very competitive rates because our flights are not direct and currently have no plans to change the route. This is because the flights from Dubai have to stop at Muscat so that we can serve our full market," said Rebello.

"The fares to Trivandrum and Kochi are also common rated which provides customers with the flexibility of flying from either destination on the same ticket." He added: "We are very happy with this new destination because come September, we will be offering a total of nine flights a week to Southern India."