SilkAir, a wholly-owned subsidiary and regional carrier of Singapore Airlines, will start daily operations to Bangalore and Chennai in the next couple of months.

While services to Bangalore will start on May 17, the Singapore-Chennai services will start in the first week of June. Mr Jooleng Teo, State Manager (Karnataka), Singapore Airlines, said that there was improvement in demand from Indian destinations, and the load factor was at healthy levels. According to him, the air fares for the to-be-introduced SilkAir operations were being finalised. SilkAir currently operates flights to Hyderabad, Kochi, Coimbatore and Thiruvananthapuram. The new SilkAir connectivity in the Bangalore-Singapore and Chennai-Singapore sectors would take the number of flights to these two Indian cities from the Singapore Airlines group to 14 a week each.

Mr Teo said that the airline was “retro-fitting Singapore Airlines flights to Bangalore and Chennai.” As part of the airline's cabin enhancement programme, flights to these cities would have a “more luxurious, comfortable and new-look business class” from May 28. However, “because of the improved business-class seats, the per-flight capacity of these services would be reduced,” he added. Thus, the flights, which had 288-seat capacity (12 first-class seats, 42 business-class and 234 economy seats), would now have 266 seats – 38 business-class seats and 228 economy seats. “We are dropping first-class seats completely. We are quite confident that the new business-class seats would meet the demands of the premium class,” said Mr Teo.

Singapore Airlines would also be reinstating capacity on its Mumbai and Delhi routes from March 30 and June 2 respectively and thus would have 14 flights a week from each city instead of the reduced capacity of 11 flights a week.