Jet suspends flights to 13 foreign destinations, scales down 7 routes

Jet Airways, on the verge of going belly-up, has suspended operations on as many as 13 more international routes till end-April, besides scaling down frequencies on seven other overseas routes, mostly from Delhi and Mumbai, according to airline sources.

The routes where services have been temporarily withdrawn include Pune-Singapore (seven a week), which was launched with much fanfare late last December, and Pune-Abu Dhabi (seven flights a week).

Jet Airways has already suspended services on the Mumbai-Manchester route.

Gasping for funds and no bailout on the horizon, the Naresh Goyal-controlled airline has now reduced its operations to one-fourth from over 600 daily flights earlier, with just one-third of its 119 fleet being operational.

The airline has discontinued services from Delhi to Abu Dhabi (nine a week), Dammam (14 weekly), Dhaka (11), Hong Kong and Riyadh (seven each a week) up to April 30, said the airline source.

Besides, the airline has also suspended services on the Bangalore-Singapore route, where it flies twice daily, till April 30.

The flights which have been suspended from Mumbai for this period include services to Abu Dhabi (12 weekly), Bahrain (4-7 weekly), and Dammam (14 weekly). These services will remain suspended till April 30, as per the source.

Similarly, flights on the Mumbai-Hong Kong (7 weekly) route will also not be operated between March 23 and April 30, while the Kolkata-Dhaka services have also been suspended till April 30.

In addition to this, services from Delhi and Mumbai to Kathmandu, Bangkok, Doha, Kuwait and Singapore have been also reduced significantly.

However, the airline has not yet informed the exchanges about these reduction and suspension of services.