Turkish Airlines Resumes Tehran Services after Long Halt

Following months of ups and downs, Turkey’s flag carrier Turkish Airlines resumed its flights to Tehran on 26 September after six months of suspension over the COVID-19 pandemic. Although according to the schedule, 31 flights per week were to be carried out to Tehran, Shiraz, Tabriz, Isfahan, and Mashhad, now there will be only seven flights per week between Tehran and Istanbul, Alireza Majzubi, an official at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport announced on Saturday.

He also noted that the outbound passengers need to hold a health certificate with a negative coronavirus PCR test result, otherwise the boarding pass won’t be issued for them. He further noted that health of passengers and airport staff and personnel is of the most important priority in Imam Khomeini Airport City.

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 in the world, “We witnessed the considerable decline in the number of travels and consequently cancelling the flights in most countries such as Islamic Republic of Iran", he said, adding, “According to the Airports Council International (ACI), the number of passengers in the world airports in the first three months of the current year in 2020 hit 26.4% slump, the rate of which hit 89.6% decline in the second three months of the current year as compared to the same period of last year.” Currently, Qatar Airways and Emirates Airline along with a number of domestic airlines have resumed their flights to IKIA while Turkish Airlines resumed its flights to Imam Khomeini International Airport,  he added.

In late August, Turkish Airlines extended the suspension of its flights to Iran until October 1, reneging on its previous announcement for resuming flights to Tehran and four other cities of Tabriz, Shiraz, Mashhad, and Isfahan as of September 1. Although Turkey resumed flights to many countries in June and July after few months of suspension over the COVID-19 pandemic, it kept its common borders with Iran closed, while these repeated delays in the reopening Iran-Turkey borders have damaged the tourism ties between the two countries.

As Turkey is a country through which many trips of Iranians living abroad and foreign nationals to Iran are made, the flight suspensions prevented several businessmen and students from continuing their activities and even left patients who want to go abroad for further treatment helpless. The pandemic has taken a huge toll on Iran’s civil aviation sector with reports showing that airlines lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of flight cancellations during the busy New Year travel season in late March. - Mehr, Tehran Times