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.
Update, 27 October: the aircraft, the cabins and the quotes
EconomyNext filed on the resumption on Tuesday, attributing its account to the Ministry of Ports and Civil Aviation and closing several of the gaps recorded below.
The service is operated with Boeing 777 aircraft, three flights a week, in three cabin classes — Club World, World Traveller Plus and World Traveller. EconomyNext puts the inaugural arrival on 24 October, matching the account above.
On fares, it confirms the Rs 255,000 World Traveller return from Colombo to London Gatwick and adds that discounts of up to 10 percent are also on offer.
Two named executives are quoted for the first time. Neil Chernoff, British Airways’ Chief Planning and Strategy Officer, said resuming flights reconnects Sri Lanka with the airline’s global network. Ruwan Waidyaratne, Managing Director of Hayleys Advantis, said the resumption develops aviation connectivity between the two countries.
EconomyNext adds one piece of commercial context: SriLankan Airlines has historically treated the Colombo–London Heathrow sector as one of its most resilient and lucrative premium long-haul routes — which makes the Gatwick service a competitor on the national carrier’s strongest European route rather than an addition to an unserved one.
Not reported
The filings do not give the seat configuration or a figure for the capacity being added, state whether the service is year-round or seasonal, or say how long the promotional pricing lasts. Neither states the reason the airline withdrew previously, and neither resolves the arrival-time discrepancy noted above — EconomyNext gives the date but not the hour. No fare is given for the two premium cabins.
On sourcing: when first published this article recorded that no other verified newsroom had filed on the arrival, which was accurate then — checks of the EconomyNext and Daily FT home pages, the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing and NewsFirst’s Saturday index all returned nothing. EconomyNext has since filed, and that statement is retired rather than left standing.
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 — describing a different schedule, a routing via Malé and officials who no longer hold office. None of them is cited here.
