Vietnam Airlines Operates 1st Int’l Flight since COVID-19

Vietnam marked, on Saturday, its first regular international flight after a nearly two-year hiatus since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A flight, carrying 121 passengers from Cambodia’s Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh, landed in the southern economic hub’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport Saturday evening.

It followed Vietnam’s plan to reopen air routes to destinations abroad to start the first day of 2022 and resume international passenger transport and boost economic recovery.

Uch Leang, Acting Director of the Department of Asian, African and Middle East Studies of the International Relations Institute of Cambodia, hailed the reopening, calling it a strong and prompt decision of the Vietnamese Government given the regional efforts for socio-economic recovery.

On the other hand, more than 2,400 flights in the United States and over 4,300 internationally had been cancelled by midday Saturday, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.

This was the greatest single-day toll just before Christmas, when airlines began blaming rising COVID-19 infections among crews on staffing constraints. Since December 24, almost 12,000 flights in the United States have been cancelled.