As per Air Deccan schedule, the flight will operate from Monday to Saturday. Express Photo By Amit Mehra
Private carrier Air Deccan is all set to start its flight operations from Ludhiana’s Sahnewal Airport to Delhi. The same plane which will also fly to Shimla and Kullu under the UDAN (Udey Desh Ka Aam Nagrik) scheme of the Central government.
On September 2, 2017, an Air India flight from Ludhiana to Delhi was revived after three years under UDAN scheme and is currently operating four days a week from Sahnewal Airport. According to Air Deccan’s flight schedule posted on its website, the services is proposed to start from May 21. However, the airport authorities at Sahnewal said that dates and timings are yet to get approval from the slotting team of Airport Authority of India (AAI) in Delhi.
As per the schedule released by Air Deccan, the flight will start from Delhi at 5.10 am and reach Ludhiana at 6.40 am. Then it will fly for Shimla at 7 am and land at 7.35 am. Then it will then fly from Shimla to Ludhiana at 8.05 and arrive at 8.40 am. It will later fly for Kullu from Sahnewal at 9 am and arrive there at 9.45 am. The flight will leave from Kullu at 10.15 am and land at Sahnewal at 11 am. Finally, the plane will leave for Delhi from Sahnewal at 11.20 am and arrive at Delhi airport at 12.50 pm.
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However, according to AN Sharma, director, Sahnewal airport, the timings might undergo a change and the flight from Delhi to Ludhiana may land at 8.40 am instead of 6.40 am. He also said that they are waiting for an approval from the slot allocation team of AAI from Delhi. “Air Deccan has given a tentative date of May 21 but some change is expected in timings. Also, we need one week’s time in advance to prepare the airport for handling the second flight. As soon as we get approval from AAI, flight operations will start and it is expected this month itself,” he said.
As per Air Deccan schedule, the flight will operate from Monday to Saturday. Currently, just one Air India flight operates from Sahnewal Airport to Delhi and vice versa. Air Deccan is expected to fly its nineteen seater plane on this route and as per UDAN guidelines, ten seats will be subsidized for up to Rs 2,500. Price of rest of nine seats might go up to Rs 3,500.
Divya Goyal is a Principal Correspondent with The Indian Express, based in Punjab.
Her interest lies in exploring both news and feature stories, with an effort to reflect human interest at the heart of each piece. She writes on gender issues, education, politics, Sikh diaspora, heritage, the Partition among other subjects. She has also extensively covered issues of minority communities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She also explores the legacy of India's partition and distinct stories from both West and East Punjab.
She is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi, the most revered government institute for media studies in India, from where she pursued English Journalism (Print). Her research work on “Role of micro-blogging platform Twitter in content generation in newspapers” had won accolades at IIMC.
She had started her career in print journalism with Hindustan Times before switching to The Indian Express in 2012.
Her investigative report in 2019 on gender disparity while treating women drug addicts in Punjab won her the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in 2020. She won another Laadli for her ground report on the struggle of two girls who ride a boat to reach their school in the border village of Punjab.
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