Jet Airways had announced last year in May, the launch of their new services between Mumbai and Manchester. This service took off for the first time on an Airbus 330-200 on November 5, 2018 for the first time. Now, looks like Jet Airways Manchester station will be closed this weekend.

Unfortunately, Jet Airways fell on hard times about the time they started this service, and things haven’t been great for the airline. I don’t need to say much more than that, given I just wrote a piece or few on this issue and my head is literally exploding keeping an eye on the chessboard of Jet Airways at the moment, apart from all the sort of Twitter and Instagram support I am providing harrowed customers at this point of time at the moment.

Jet Airways operated Mumbai – Manchester flight on the following schedule.

Anyhow, establishing a route takes time. So, clearly, this flight was more an investment announced and made in the good times of the airline (May 2018), and it did not work out for them as well as they had hoped.

While Jet Airways has not announced the closure of the route just yet, the route is being closed out by Jet Airways for bookings as of March 23, 2019, onwards. Which means, the last flight will take off on March 22, 2019, from Mumbai to Manchester. Jet Airways is still promoting this flight on the homepage of their website.

Anyhow, this flight has stopped selling after March 22. I won’t hold Jet Airways guilty of this after March 30, given that comes into the summer schedule, but the fact that this flight is not selling after this week itself, indicates the flight is closed for future booking.

There are three reasons that Jet Airways may have made this move now:

• Jet Airways does not have the money to operate this flight, so they are pulling out one of their less impressive sectors for now.
• Jet Airways will operate this A330-200 on domestic frequencies for the moment, but I checked a lot of the metro routes, and it still has not made it to all the metro routes as of now.
• Jet Airways lessor for this aircraft would have also served them a notice to ground this aircraft. I have not been able to establish if this is an owned or a leased aircraft (VT-JWP) which operated this flight. UPDATE: This is a leased aircraft.

Other international flights are also seeing cancellations, but mostly on the 737 networks for the moment, so I am just trying to be fair to the airline in this case with all the above scenarios being presented.

What do you think happened to the Mumbai – Manchester route that deserved a sudden withdrawal?