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Saudia Arabian Airlines “to Operate Flying Taxis for Ferrying Pilgrims Between Jeddah and Makkah”

Sau­di Ara­bi­an Air­lines announced this week, plans to oper­ate fly­ing taxis to fer­ry Hajj pil­grims between King Abdu­laz­iz Inter­na­tion­al Air­port in Jed­dah and hotels in Makkah, locat­ed close to the Grand Mosque and oth­er holy places, reports saudigazette.com. The Nation­al Car­ri­er is mak­ing prepa­ra­tions to use air taxis as a new mode of trans­porta­tion dur­ing the Hajj sea­son, accord­ing to Abdul­lah Al-Shahrani, direc­tor of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions and spokesman of the Saudia Group.

A major recip­i­ent will be Lil­i­um. Last Octo­ber, the Sau­di com­pa­ny con­tract­ed the Ger­man-based man­u­fac­tur­er, to pur­chase 100 Lil­i­um eVTOL jets.

Al-Shahrani com­ment­ed, “After com­plet­ing the nec­es­sary arrange­ments, these planes will fly with the guests of God dur­ing Hajj and Umrah sea­sons. The Lil­i­um air­craft is char­ac­terised by a low rate of car­bon emis­sions and is an envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly air­craft, which makes it one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties for sus­tain­ing air trav­el and short­en­ing the time of flights, as it cov­ers a max­i­mum dis­tance of 250 km.”

He con­tin­ued, “Through pur­chas­ing near­ly 100 air­craft, Sau­di Air­lines intends to con­nect a num­ber of trav­el des­ti­na­tions via this advanced form of elec­tric air­craft, and will sup­port it with air routes between the main air­ports from where Saudia oper­ates.”

Al-Shahrani explained the air­craft fea­tures a unique and flex­i­ble cab­in that offers sev­er­al options for seat arrange­ment and is char­ac­terised by spa­cious spaces that meet the needs of elite guests look­ing for the finest trav­el expe­ri­ence. Sau­di Air­lines will work to sup­port Lil­i­um by pro­vid­ing all the nec­es­sary reg­u­la­to­ry approvals to oper­ate this type of air­craft in the Sau­di Ara­bia mar­ket.

He remarked, “In the frame­work of efforts to improve the air trans­port sec­tor in the King­dom, this ini­tia­tive will con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to stim­u­lat­ing the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the tourism sec­tor.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://lilium.com/jet

https://www.saudia.com

(News Source: https://saudigazette.com.sa)

(Top image: Lil­i­um)

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