British Airways has resumed direct flights between Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom after a break of more than 11 years, with the first aircraft from London Gatwick touching down at Bandaranaike International Airport, Katunayake, on Saturday.
The United Kingdom’s flag carrier is restoring a non-stop link between Colombo and London that has not existed for over a decade, Hiru News reported on Saturday afternoon.
The schedule
Under the new service, flights will operate between London Gatwick and Colombo every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
| Flight | Departs | Arrives |
|---|---|---|
| BA2045 | London Gatwick, 4.40 p.m. | Colombo, 8.35 a.m. the following day |
| BA2044 | Colombo, 10.35 a.m. | London Gatwick, 5.00 p.m. |
To mark the resumption, the airline has introduced promotional fares and discounts for passengers travelling from Colombo to London. A World Traveller class return ticket is available at a price of around Rs. 255,000, the report said.
One detail does not line up
The filing states that the first aircraft arrived at Katunayake in the afternoon of Saturday 24 October. The schedule printed in the same report has the inbound service, BA2045, arriving in Colombo at 8.35 a.m.
The two statements are not reconcilable as written. An inaugural service running several hours behind its published timing would explain it, as would a loosely worded arrival time; the report says neither. Readers planning around the timetable should treat the published 8.35 a.m. arrival as the scheduled time rather than the observed one until a second filing confirms it.
A related point of sequence is worth stating plainly, because it looks like a contradiction and is not one. A service that leaves London on one evening lands in Colombo the next morning. A departure date and an arrival date for the same flight will therefore always differ by a day.
What the photograph shows
The image published with the report is genuine arrival photography rather than stock: ground staff in high-visibility vests and cabin crew are grouped under the tail of a British Airways aircraft registered G-YMMA, holding a Sri Lankan national flag and a Union flag between them, with the Katunayake control tower and a SriLankan Airlines aircraft visible behind. It is carried here as evidence of the arrival; it is not reproduced, because it is watermarked throughout with another newsroom’s mark.
Context
An absence of “more than 11 years” places the end of the carrier’s previous Colombo operation at around 2015. This desk’s archive contains no coverage of that withdrawal, which predates it.
The return matters for two constituencies beyond holidaymakers. The United Kingdom hosts one of the largest Sri Lankan diaspora populations outside South Asia, and a direct service removes a connection through a Gulf or South Asian hub from those journeys. It also adds long-haul seat capacity into Katunayake from a major European originating market at the start of the winter season, when arrivals from Europe are at their highest.
Not reported
The filing does not name the aircraft type or seat configuration, state whether the service is year-round or seasonal, give a figure for the capacity being added, or report any official ceremony or comment from the airline, the airport operator or the Ministry of Tourism. It does not say what fare bands other than World Traveller carry, or how long the promotional pricing lasts. It also does not state the reason the airline withdrew previously.
On sourcing: at the time of writing no other verified newsroom had filed on the arrival. Checks of the EconomyNext and Daily FT home pages, the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing and NewsFirst’s Saturday index returned nothing on it. Readers should note that a search for earlier coverage of this route returns a cluster of 2011 reports on the airline’s previous return to Colombo — a different event, eleven years before this one — and those reports describe a different schedule, a different routing via Malé and officials who no longer hold office. None of them is cited here.
Sources: British Airways resumes operations in Sri Lanka after 11 years — Hiru News, October 24 (Sinhala).
