NEW DELHI: An all-women cockpit crew will operate the January 9 inaugural of Air India\u2019s longest nonstop \u2014 San Francisco (SFO)-Bengaluru \u2014 which starts plying this week.
\nThe airline has rostered four of its highly-experienced women pilots \u2014 Captains Zoya Agrawal, Thanmai Papagari, Sonwane Akanksha and Shivani Manhas \u2014 to fly a Boeing 777-200 (long-range or LR) for the inaugural via the polar route \u2014 en route Bengaluru \u2014 for the first direct scheduled flight between south India and the US.
\n\u201cTwo sets of two pilots each operate our ultra-long flights by turn. Besides the four pilots, our head of flight safety, a senior woman commander, will also be on board. While it depends on weather conditions of the day, we are planning the B777 will fly over the north pole en route Bengaluru,\u201d said a senior AI official.
\nThe four operated the Delhi-SFO late Wednesday with AI\u2019s executive director of flight safety, Captain Nivedita Bhasin, on board.
\nThe Bengaluru-SFO shortest flight distance is over 14,000 km, about 1,000 km more than Delhi-SFO. Very often airlines take longer routes to get tailwinds and avoid headwinds. The AI flight, for instance, took the Pacific route from Delhi to SFO. The inaugural to Bengaluru will take the Atlantic route over North Pole \u2014 getting tailwinds on both sectors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW DELHI: An all-women cockpit crew will operate the January 9 inaugural of Air India\u2019s longest nonstop \u2014 San Francisco (SFO)-Bengaluru \u2014 which starts plying this week. The airline has rostered four of its highly-experienced women pilots \u2014 Captains Zoya Agrawal, Thanmai Papagari, Sonwane Akanksha and Shivani Manhas \u2014 to fly a Boeing 777-200 (long-range or LR) for the inaugural via the polar route \u2014 en route Bengaluru \u2014 for the first direct scheduled flight between south India and the US. \u201cTwo sets of two pilots each operate our ultra-long flights by turn. Besides the four pilots, our head of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,130,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation-the-times-of-india","category-newspapers","category-the-times-of-india"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}