June 20, 2025 - Air India has announced a major reduction of flights on 18 of its international routes connecting cities in North America, Europe, Australia and the Far East. This announcement has come a day after it said it would suspend operations with wide-body aircraft by 15%.

The Tata Group-owned airline said on June 19 that it will cut 38 international flights per week and suspend services on three overseas routes between June 21 and July 15, 2025. The reason given behind this decision is to restore schedule stability and minimise last-minute inconvenience to passengers.

The airline is carrying out enhanced pre-flight safety checks on its Boeing 787 fleet as well as its Boeing 777 aircraft as part of its confidence-building measure. This comes in the wake of the June 12 tragic crash of an Air India flight from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick killing 241 people on board and several on the ground.

"Regrettably, the time required to perform these enhanced safety checks, along with the application of extra caution, external factors like airspace closures in Iran and the Middle East as well as night-time restrictions at some international airports, along with normal airline technical issues, has led to a higher-than-usual number of cancellations on our long-haul network in the past few days," Air India CEO and managing director Campbell Wilson said.

Services will be suspended on Delhi-Nairobi, Amritsar-London (Gatwick) and Goa (Mopa)-London (Gatwick) till July 15. The Delhi-Nairobi route has four flights per week while the Amritsar-London (Gatwick) and Goa (Mopa)-London (Gatwick) routes each have three flights a week.

The routes in North America with reduced frequencies will be Delhi-Toronto, Delhi-Vancouver, Delhi-San Francisco, Delhi-Chicago and Delhi-Washington.

The routes in Europe with reduced flight services include Delhi-London Heathrow, Bengaluru-London Heathrow, Amristsar-Birmingham and Delhi-Birmingham, Delhi-Paris, Delhi-Milan, Delhi-Copenhagen, Delhi-Vienna and Delhi-Amsterdam. Services on Delhi-Melbourne, Delhi-Sydney, Delhi-Tokyo Haneda and Delhi-Seoul (Incheon) have also been cut down.

"The reductions arise from the decision to voluntarily undertake enhanced pre-flight safety checks, as well as accommodate additional flight durations arising from airspace closures in the Middle East," Air India said in a statement.

With Media Inputs