BA to launch first direct Bangalore flights

British Airways (BA) will start the first direct flights from the UK to Bangalore this weekend to cater for demand from business travellers involved in India's high-tech industry.

The direct flights from London Heathrow to Bangalore begin on Sunday 30 October and the Boeing 777 service will run five times per week each way.

Up until now most business travellers have been forced to take an international flight to Mumbai or New Delhi, arriving in the early hours of the morning before changing for a short domestic flight to Bangalore - as experienced here on silicon.com's offshore outsourcing fact-finding trip to India last year.

The new BA flight will allow people to fly directly into the city, which has also just given approval for a new $284m international airport to be built.

BA said it has been able to launch the new Bangalore service following a change in the bilateral agreement between the UK and Indian governments that had previously restricted the number of services airline carriers could fly to India.

The lifting of some of those restrictions means BA has been able to launch its direct service to Bangalore as well as increase the frequency of existing flights to Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi.

A spokesman for BA told silicon.com the Bangalore flight will cater for the huge number of UK and US business travellers now needing to visit their offshore IT operations in the city.

He said: "The government agreement opened up Bangalore for us and there is a massive IT market there. As we already operate direct flights from San Francisco to London Heathrow we also see it as linking Bangalore, which has been called the second Silicon Valley, to the original Silicon Valley."

Bangalore officials claimed last year that it is on the verge of overtaking California's Silicon Valley as the biggest IT employment region in the world on the back of the rise in offshore outsourcing.