Key points:
- Union Civil Aviation Min Hardeep S Puri said, “Today, Air India, SpiceJet and IndiGo Airlines will operate nine flights from Pune with 56.5 lakh doses to Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Shillong, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Bengaluru, Lucknow and Chandigarh”.
- The first consignment has already left for Delhi in the early morning.
Airlines, including Air India and SpiceJet, will begin flying vaccines out from Pune on January 12, to different parts of the country.
Sources confirmed that the SpiceJet flight took off from the Pune airport at 8 am, to Delhi, with India’s first consignment of the vaccines.
Air India will fly a consignment to Ahmedabad, at 9.40 am. “The Air India flight will carry a load of 700 kg,” a senior executive from the industry told Moneycontrol.
Sources added that GoAir, the Wadia family owned low-cost airline, is also moving consignments from Pune.
Pune is home to the Serum Institute of India, which is manufacturing the Covishield vaccine. The Indian government has contracted the company to supply 11 million doses of the vaccine.
“The first consignment of Covishield consisting of 34 boxes and weighing 1088 kg was carried from Pune to Delhi on SpiceJet flight 8937,” said Ajay Singh, Chairman and Managing Director, SpiceJet.
He added that the airline will carry vaccine consignments to different Indian cities including Guwahati, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Bengaluru, Patna and Vijayawada through the day, on January 12.
The Indian government will launch the vaccination drive from January 16, and the transportation of the vaccines have begun in advance to ensure a steady supply chain. In the first phase, 3 crore healthcare and frontline professionals will be vaccinated.
Much of the vaccines from Serum’s Pune facility will also be moved to the Mumbai airport, which has a larger capacity. The Mumbai airport will be handling over half of the Covishield vaccines coming out of Serum Institute of India’s (SII’s) Pune facility.
The Pune airport is controlled and owned by the Indian Air Force, and is undergoing runway resurfacing. It is closed from 8 pm to 8 am, limiting its ability to transport vaccines.
Apart from the Mumbai airport, the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad will also have a critical role, as the southern metro is home to Bharat Biotech, which is making Covaxin. Also, Dr Reddy’s Lab, which won the contract to test and manufacture Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, is also based in Hyderabad.
Covishield and Covaxin have got the nod from the government for emergency use.
