Repatriation flight lands in Bengaluru from Malaysia
Bengaluru: An Air India repatriation flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia landed in Bengaluru airport with 142 Indian returnees, including 94 for Karnataka and 48 to Ahmedabad in Gujarat, an official said on Tuesday.
“The Airbus A320-251N landed at the Kempegowda international airport at 6:44 p.m. from Kuala Lumpur with 142 passengers, 16 minutes ahead of its scheduled arrival,” an airline official told IANS.
Of the total returnees, 94, including 63 men, 30 women and an infant alighted at the airport, while the remaining 48, with 40 men and 8 women seated in the aircraft for their onward journey to Ahmedabad.
“The airline staff and the state government officials received the returnees at the arrival terminal and gave them masks to and sanitizer to wash their hands.
All the passengers were screened with a thermal device to read their body temperature though only asymptomatic have been flown.
After completing formalities, including immigration check and filling the self-declaration form, the returnees were taken in state-run buses in batches for 14-day institutional quarantine in hotels and resorts across the city.
Passengers were also told to download the mandatory quarantine app, the Aroygya Setu app and Apthamitra app on their mobile before leaving the airport for contact tracing later.
The service was the second to the southern state in the second phase of Vande Bharat Mission, the national carrier and its Express arm are operating 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 spread.
The first flight in the second phase landed on Monday night at Mangaluru airport on the state’s west coast, with 177 returnees from Dubai in the UAE.
The remaining 16 flights to Karnataka will land in Bengaluru over the next 15 days till June 3 from 13 more destinations the world over.
In the first phase of the mission from May 7-17, the airline and its arm flew 6 flights to the state from May 11-15, bringing in 800 passengers, including 623 to Bengaluru and 177 to Mangaluru on the state’s west coast from London, Singapore, San Francisco and Dubai.