The first resuming flight of Russia’s largest charter airline, Azur Air has arrived at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) a short while ago, according to Ada Derana correspondent.

The first flight reportedly arrived with around 335 passengers onboard.

Russian airlines have not been flying to Sri Lanka since early June, when an A330-300 operated by Aeroflot was briefly detained due to a dispute with lessor AerCap’s special purpose vehicle Celestial Aviation Trading Limited. 

Even though the court quickly released the aircraft and the Sri Lankan government guaranteed that no further seizures would be made in the country, Russian airlines had been reluctant to return to the island.

However, Russia’s flagship carrier Aeroflot last month resumed flights between Moscow and Colombo after a lapse of 4 months.

Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Tourism had announced that Azur Air would be re-commencing flights to Sri Lanka starting from today (November 03).

It was also announced that Air France, the flag carrier of France, has also scheduled to resume its flights to Sri Lanka from Friday (Nov 04).

Meanwhile in a Twitter message yesterday, Minister of Tourism, Harin Fernando announced that Switzerland’s national airline, Swiss International Air Lines, is now starting operations in Sri Lanka once again with weekly flights starting from November 10 to May2023. 

Minister Fernando mentioned that this will further strengthen the European arrivals for the season.