Evacuation flight from Muscat lands in Bengaluru
Bengaluru: An Air India Express flight from Muscat, Oman, landed here with 179 Karnataka returnees, comprising 115 passengers for Bengaluru and 64 for Mangaluru, said an official on Wednesday.
“IX-818 Boeing 737 landed at the city airport at 6.31 p.m. 115 passengers, including 2 infants, disembarked here, while 64 flew to Mangaluru,” the airline official told IANS.
The airline staff and the state government officials received the returnees at the arrival terminal and gave them masks to wear and sanitizer to wash hands.
All passengers were screened with thermal device though only Covid-19 asymptomatic persons had been flown back.
After completing formalities, including immigration check and filling the self-declaration form, the returnees were taken in state-run buses in batches for the 14-day institutional quarantine in hotels and resorts across the city.
Passengers had to download the mandatory quarantine app on their mobile phones before leaving the airport for contact tracing.
The flight was the third to the southern state in the second phase of the Vande Bharat Mission.
Air India is operating flights to repatriate thousands of Indians, including distressed workers, migrants, students, senior citizens and tourists, stranded overseas since the government suspended international flights on March 23 and enforced an extended lockdown on March 25 to combat Covid-19.
The first flight in the second phase landed on Monday night at Mangaluru, with 177 returnees from Dubai, the UAE. The second flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia landed here on Tuesday evening with 94 returnees.
The remaining flights to Karnataka will land in Bengaluru over the next 13 days till June 3 from 12 more destinations.
