(Uzbekistan Airways)
ASTANA, April 11 (Xinhua) -- After a quarter of a century, flights between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan resumed on Tuesday when a plane of Uzbekistan Airways, carrying 25 people, landed at the international airport of Dushanbe.
Another plane, operated by Tajik Somon Air airline, with 12 people onboard, is expected to fly to Tashkent on the same day.
Regular flights between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were interrupted in 1992 after the outbreak of a civil war in Tajikistan. In November 2016, the two countries signed a protocol on resuming flights between their capitals in the first half of 2017.
Uzbekistan Airways announced in May that it had planned to begin twice-a-week fights, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, on the Tashkent-Dushanbe-Tashkent route starting April 4. However, the first flight was canceled because only a few tickets had been sold.
Uzbekistan Airways is a monopoly carrier in Uzbekistan, wholly owned by the state. It currently operates flights to over 20 cities in Europe, America, the Middle East and Asia, and to 22 cities of the Commonwealth Of Independent States and 11 destinations in Uzbekistan.
A single purchase
