Kingfisher to start Pune-Goa flight

Those travelling to and from Pune will soon have an option, while those wanting to enjoy holidays and festivals in Goa will for the first time get to reach their destination directly through Kingfisher Red which is all set to link Nagpur with Pune and Goa from July 1. Confirming the development, a senior official of Kingfisher Red said, “The airline has finalised plans to link Nagpur with Pune and Goa by introducing the ATR aircraft. The flight will operate on the Nagpur-Indore-Pune and Goa route and the return flight will operate on Goa-Pune-Indore and Nagpur route. The flight IT-2801 will take off from Nagpur at 8.10 am and reach Indore at 9.30 am. It will leave Indore at 9.55 am and reach Pune at 11.15 am. From Pune, it will leave at 12 noon and reach Goa at 1.15 pm.

This means that the passengers will reach Pune with one stop at Indore in three hours and Goa in five hours, the official added. On the return journey, the flight IT-2802 will depart from Goa at 1.45 pm, reach Pune at 3 pm, leave Pune at 4.50 pm and reach Indore at 6.10 am before landing in Nagpur at 8 am. The fares for Goa will start from Rs 9,000 onwards while Pune fares will be from Rs 4,000 onwards, the official added. Sources at airport said, The Kingfisher Red Pune flight will be another option for travelers to go to Pune as Indigo is already operating a daily Pune flight with a minimum fare of Rs 1,779.

Yemenia A310 crashes into the Indian Ocean

An Airbus 310 belonging to Yemenia, Yemen’s national airline, and flying to Moroni, the capital of Grand Comore, fell into the sea a few miles short of its destination. The flight had originally taken off from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport for Sana'a, Yemen's capital, with 147 passengers. In Sana'a, 67 onward bound passengers then changed planes and flew on via Djibouti to Comoros, where the aircraft is thought to have come down in "choppy" weather three to six miles short of Moroni. "The plane has crashed and we still don't know exactly where," said the Comoros' vice-president, Idi Nadhoim, who went immediately to the airport. "We think it's in the area of Mitsamiouli. There were 150 passengers on board."

Television reports suggested that families waiting to meet passengers at Moroni airport saw the plane make an approach to the runway, and turn to make a second attempt. It never returned, disappearing from radar screens shortly afterwards. Sana'a airport later gave a figure of 142 passengers with the remainder being crew. There were no immediate reports of survivors, officials said, though speedboats had been dispatched to the scene. The Comoros is an archipelago nation of three islands between Mozambique and Madagascar off the coast of East Africa. It used to be a French colony and a fourth island, Mayotte, in the archipelago remains under French rule. French military jets based at Mayotte and another Indian Ocean territory, Reunion, were helping with the search for survivors.

"We think the crash is somewhere along its landing approach," Ibrahim Kassim, of the Agency for Aviation Security and Navigation in Africa and Madagascar, said. "The weather is really not very favourable. The sea is very rough." Grand Comore is the largest of the islands, the others being Mohéli and Anjouan. Its 800,000 population makes it one of Africa's smallest countries, but also one of its most densely populated. Yemen, which occupies the southernmost part of the Arabian peninsula, is often troubled by Islamist, sectarian and tribal violence, and the authorities there are still looking for a Briton and and a German family of five kidnapped there earlier this month. However, there are no initial suspicions of terrorist involvement on this occasion.