Mangaluru: Close on the heels of starting a direct flight service between Mangaluru and Hyderabad on Saturday, the Mangalore International Airport (MIA) is set to offer another daily direct flight, this time, to Delhi.
With no direct flight to the national capital, people from Mangaluru had either to depend upon connecting flights via Bengaluru or Mumbai to reach Delhi with their journey taking up to 10 hours, or depend upon trains with journey hours beyond 30 hours.

However, with the new service, one could reach Delhi in 2 hours 50 minutes.

Jet Airways will deploy a Boeing 737 aircraft with 160 seats on the Mangaluru-Delhi-Mangaluru sector, services of which would start on January 16, according to J.T. Radhakrishna, Director of Mangalore International Airport.

Flight No. 9W 763 will leave Mangaluru at 8 a.m. to reach Delhi at 10.50 a.m. In the return journey, flight no. 9W 764 will leave Delhi at 3 p.m. to reach Mangaluru at 5.50 p.m.

Mr. Radhakrishna said that Air India operated a small aircraft on this sector about six years ago. After the services were stopped, people found it difficult to travel between the two cities and there was demand for a direct service.

With direct service to Delhi, best connectivity would be available to Chandigarh, Amritsar, Dehradun, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Patna, Guwahati on the domestic sector and to Kathmandu, Bangkok, London and Dhaka on the international sector, he said.

Attractive fares

During the inaugural flights, Jet Airways has kept fares at Rs. 4,823 to Delhi from Mangaluru and Rs. 4,664 to Mangaluru from Delhi.

The fare in 3 tier AC of the Rajdhani Express is Rs. 3,030 and 2 tier AC is Rs. 4,220. Fares on regular super fast express trains are about Rs. 2,200 for 3 tier AC and about Rs. 3,200 for 2 tier AC between Mangaluru and New Delhi. While the Rajdhani Express takes 31 hours to complete the journey between Mangaluru and Delhi, other super fast trains take about 35 to 39 hours.