Finnair – Finland’s flag carrier airline – has added Mumbai as a new destination in Summer 2022 and announced scheduled services between Mumbai and Helsinki starting July 2022. The new launch makes Mumbai its second destination in India. The airline has been operating to New Delhi from Helsinki since October 2006. The airline started operations to India with the MD-11. The airline moved to add four weekly flights to New Delhi and was scheduled to operate Daily flights starting July 2020, which did not happen as the world went into a lock down.
The airline currently operates the A350XWB to New Delhi and will operate the Airbus A330 to Mumbai. Finnair will operate from Mumbai and Helsinki three times a week, i.e., on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. The route to Mumbai will be the eight Asian destination for Finnair – which is part of Oneworld alliance. It would be interesting to see the timings since the airline has experimented quite a bit with its timings at Delhi – having launched with red eye departures and later shifted it to morning departure from Delhi. This summer, the airline will depart Delhi at 0800hours.
India and Finland crystalized the air bubble agreement in December 2021 and saw Finnair return to New Delhi from December 06, 2021 with twice a week flights. The airline is free to add services starting March 27, 2022, when India starts allowing all scheduled commercial services.
Finnair has been impacted by the closure of Russian airspace. This has meant that the airline has to cancel some of its Asian flights for few days before returning via a polar routing to Japan and adding time for flights to India and other Asian destinations. The flight to New Delhi – which was marketed as the shortest flight to Europe with less than 7 hours of block time, now takes up wards of 8 hours and sometimes close to 10 hours.
Finnair has been advertising itself as the shortest connection to EU and N.America – thanks to the compact terminal at Helsinki which does not require terminal transfer. The airline has 08 A330s in its fleet and they sport three different configurations (263/279/289 seats).
The Mumbai flights will be available for sale at Finnair.com and at travel agents starting April 05th, 2022. The post will be updated with the timings when the flight is available for sale.
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