IndiGo has started flights on the Chennai-Penang sector

Flight of Indigo. Image used for representation purposes only Photo credit: Vijay Soneji

Private airline IndiGo launched its first Chennai-Penang flight on Saturday (December 21, 2024), carrying 165 passengers on board the 3.5-hour service that departed Chennai at 2.15 pm.

An aviation source associated with the launch said that the daily flight will connect 38 cities in India. It is also marketed as a Madurai-Penang service (6E7253/7515) with a connecting point at Chennai and connecting via passengers. A 78-seat ATR-72 will land in the city on the Madurai-Chennai sector at 10.25 pm, while an 186-seat A320N will fly the Chennai-Penang sector (6E1045/1046). Saturday’s flight had 20 passengers connecting from Madurai.

The official said Penang has historical ties with Madurai and the airline is expecting passenger meals from Madurai, Tenkasi, Ramanathapuram, Sivakasi and Karaikudi. With Penang as the gateway to North Malaysia, the airline will cater to leisure traffic, friends and relatives (VFR), business community, and religious tourism (Sabarimala). The state, which is a four-hour drive from Kuala Lumpur, is a major electronics hub – Lenovo and Dell have centers there – and the airline will serve corporate traffic.

He said some passengers could take a ferry service from Penang to Langkawi and connect to the airline’s Langkawi-Bengaluru flight. He said that he has strengthened air connectivity between South India and Malaysia by flying A320 on Chennai-Kuala Lumpur (daily), Bengaluru-Kuala Lumpur, Bengaluru-Langkawi and now Chennai-Penang region.