KOZHIKODE (India) — Oman Air launched daily services between Muscat and the southwest Indian coastal city of Kozhikode (formerly Calicut) from June 5.

Kozhikode will be the airline’s ninth Indian destination taking capacity across India to 68 weekly services. Kozhikode city is Kerala’s third largest with a population of almost 500,000 people.

With a current capacity of 61 flights a week spread across Mumbai, New Delhi, Kochi, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Chennai, Lucknow, and Jaipur, Oman Air operates an extensive network of services throughout India. The addition of Kozhikode, is its third gateway in Kerala and ninth destination in India. On the occasion, Darwish bin Ismail Al Balushi, secretary-general of the Ministry of Finance and member of the board of directors of Oman Air, who is carrying out the chief executive officer’s duties, said that India remains an important destination. The Indian travel market, he acknowledged, is one of the fastest growing markets in the world, furthermore an important destination witnessing a booming economic growth. “Today, India is absolutely the prime single market for Oman Air with a network of nine, and soon ten, cities serving non-stop Muscat.

It is enjoying tremendous economic growth, consequently aviation is just one of the key sectors benefiting from such development, and Oman Air is content to be part of this economic growth facilitating travel to and from India.” With its mounting importance in the world in terms of economic growth he added, there was an extent for higher passenger traffic between India and the Gulf.

“Oman Air was able to establish a distinctive status in the Indian travel and tourist market due to its high quality services, along with the convenient flight connections timings.

These have certainly contributed in increasing the number of passengers to and from India in general, in addition to our other destinations within the airline network.

The addition of Kozhikode demonstrates our long-term commitment to India and we look forward to developing our network further across India as we explore new route opportunities to give the travelling public even more choice,” he further said.

Darwish avowed that it was important to allow people to move from one place to another.

Every flight means a lot of joy to many people. Kozhikode is Oman Air’s 26th destination and “we hope the new service would strengthen further the existing friendly relations between Oman and India.”

He concluded by saying: “We are confident that the inauguration of the new destination, will achieve our anticipated objectives based on the feasibility study undertaken by the company connoisseurs in this regard.”

The corporate communications and media of Oman Air notified that earlier this year, the national carrier of the Sultanate, Oman Air, received clearance from Indian authorities to commence operations to the two new destinations namely Calicut and Bangalore, from Muscat.

This follows signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Sultanate and India. With the two new sectors, Oman Air’s destinations in India will go up to 10, they added. Getting the new destinations and additional capacities by Oman Air aims at covering the flights that were earlier operated from the Sultanate to India by Gulf Air.

The talks, they informed resulted in getting additional capacity for Oman Air, including increasing the number of seats on some of the flights operated by the company to India from 7,550 to 11,550 seats, an additional 4,000 seats in one way. The Civil Aviation Authority in the Sultanate and India also agreed on liberalising cargo flights to allow more air carriers in both countries to operate unlimited number of cargo flights.

The corporate communications and media of Oman Air gave information that the Muscat-Kozhikode schedules are: Departure from Muscat International Airport daily at 0145, arriving to Kozhikode at 0635. Departure from Kozhikode International Airport daily will be at 0730, arriving in Muscat International Airport at 0930.

Mohammed Salim, country manager India; Abdulrazaq Al Raisi; senior manager (sales), Usama Al Haremi, head of the corporate communications and media and Vijay Bhattia, president of the Bird Group, Lalit Khosla, VP travel division of the Bird Group participated at the press meet.