Air India Express Chennai-Abu Dhabi flights soon

Air India Express, the low-cost airline subsidiary of Air India, is launching a two-days-a-week service between Chennai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from April 30, 2009.
The Chennai-Abu Dhabi service, via Tiruchirappalli (Trichy), located in central Tamil Nadu, will run on Thursdays and Saturdays.

The new service, using Boeing 737-800 aircraft, will have an all-economy configuration with a capacity of 185 seats.

The Chennai-Abu Dhabi flight of Air India Express will leave Anna International Airport in Chennai at 12.50 p.m. and arrive at Abu Dhabi International Airport (via Tiruchirappalli) at 5 p.m.

The return flight will take off from Abu Dhabi at 6.20 p.m. and reach Chennai (via Tiruchirappalli) at 1.40 a.m.

Abu Dhabi, Air India said, would be the fifth destination that is being connected to Chennai by Air India.

Air India Express already flies to Abu Dhabi from the Indian cities of Kochi (Cochin), Kozhikode, Thiruvananthapuram and Mangalore.

With the introduction of the new service between Chennai and Abu Dhabi, Air India Express would increase its 21 flights-a-week at present to 23 a week with effect from April 30, 2009.

Air India said that it will offer a special, introductory, one-way fare starting from UAE Dirham 149 to Tiruchirappalli and Dirham 99 to Chennai, excluding taxes, adding that the special fares had already been introduced in the market “to stimulate interest and passenger loads on the new flight.”

Both Air India and Air India Express are run by the state-owned National Aviation Company of India Limited.

Air India Express, based in Mumbai, India, flies mainly to destiantions in the Middle East.