Manama: The Air India Express will resume its flights operation between Dubai and India as per original schedule starting Saturday, September 19.
The airline announced this on its official Twitter page on Friday evening hours after five of its Dubai flights were rescheduled to Sharjah after it was temporarily banned by the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (DCAA) to operate flights to and from Dubai.
The DCAA on Thursday night suspended Air India Express flights till October 2, citing that the flight had brought passengers with COVID-positive certificates twice during the last couple of weeks.
Earlier on Friday, the low-cost subsidiary of India’s national carrier Air India confirmed it had received a “notice of suspension” from the Dubai civil aviation to halt its Dubai flights from September 18 to October 2 for carrying two COVID-positive passengers on different flights.
According to the suspension notice, a passenger with COVID-positive certificate travelled on Air India Express' Jaipur-Dubai flight on September 4. A similar incident had happened in August in a Dubai bound Delhi flight and the civil aviation warned Air India Express on this incident on September 2, the authority said in the notice.
As per the UAE government rules, each passenger travelling to Dubai is required to take a RT-PCR test within 96 hours prior to the journey at an accredited lab. The negative result should be produced to the airline's staff before departure and upon requests.
The flights that were rescheduled to Sharjah due to the suspension were to Kozhikode, Thiruvananthapuram, Delhi, Mumbai and Kannur, the airline said. Kozhikode flight was rescheduled from 10:30am to 1.15pm, while the Kannur flight was procrastinated from 7.55pm to 11.55pm. But, other three flights were taken off at the scheduled time, at 2.30pm, 4.30pm, and 6.30pm respectively. More than 750 passengers flew on these flights, an airline official said. Barring one or two, most of the passengers flew on the rescheduled flights both ways, he added.
The airline has arranged additional flights to Sharjah to accommodate the affected passengers and to alleviate the inconvenience to passengers booked to fly to Dubai, the airline said in a statement. The affected passengers were also being given the option to re-book to a future date, it said.
After the suspension, Air India Express said it had recapped the instructions to the handling agencies in India to strictly abide by the regulations and SOP in relation to getting passengers on its flights. It had instructed the staff to implement a three-tier checking system to avoid any such lapses, the airline said.
The airline said the concerned ground handling agencies have taken appropriate punitive action against their staff who have been held accountable for the lapse at Delhi and Jaipur airports.
Passengers who were seated in close proximity to the COVID positive passenger on each flight had undergone COVID test/quarantined as determined by the Dubai Health authority, the airline added.
In a reply to the DCAA notice, the airline expressed its profuse apologies and narrated the various actions taken by the airline in association with the ground handling agents concerned to guard against such lapse in the future, the statement added.
This is the second time Indian airlines have been banned from traveling for carrying Covid-19 positive patients. Last month, Air India flights were barred from landing in Hong Kong between August 18 and August 31 after 14 passengers on its Delhi-Hong Kong flight of August 14 tested positive for COVID-19 post arrival.
According to the Hong Kong government rule, a passenger from India can arrive in Hong Kong only if he or she has a COVID-19 negative certificate from a test done 72 hours prior to the journey.
