Flights Between Afghanistan And UK To Return
Direct flights between Britain and Afghanistan could be about to resume, a decade after an Afghan national airline plane was hijacked and diverted to Stansted.
Ariana is currently banned from UK airspace by a European Union-wide aviation blacklist after failing safety spot checks but hopes to resume flights to Heathrow next spring.
It is looking to clear its name after buying two new planes and finding a multi-million pound injection of funds.
The airline regularly flew between Kabul and Heathrow, via the Soviet Union, until the country imploded in civil war in the early 1990s.
It then faced United Nations sanctions under the Taliban regime, while ageing aircraft and poor maintenance saw three aircraft crash between August 1997 and March 1998.
A domestic Ariana flight carrying more than 150 passengers was hijacked in February 2000 by Afghans seeking asylum.
It reached Stansted, via Tashkent, Kazakhstan and Moscow, and the hostages endured a 70-hour runway siege before their release.
However since the fall of the Taliban, an influx of international workers and the creation of a wealthy Afghan business elite funded by development contracts and drug money has led to a boom in civil aviation.
Ariana now flies a growing number of domestic flights and international routes to the Gulf, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Central Asia and last year carried more than 200,000 international passengers. It has been able to open a service to Frankfurt using a leased plane and a pit stop in Istanbul for an extra security check.
Posted on April 29, 2009 | Filed Under Travel
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