Government-owned Air India's regional arm Alliance Air will add four more cities in its route network with daily return flights to Trichy, Coimbatore, Madurai and Vijayawada from Chennai, later this month.
The airline will also make Chennai as its seventh base, by stationing one ATR aircraft to operate these services, after Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam and Jaipur, a senior Alliance Air official said.
It currently operated 55 daily flights to 36 destinations across the country with a fleet of 13 ATR planes.
"We are enhancing air connectivity within the southern region with daily return flight services to Madurai, Coimbatore, Trichy and Vijayawda from Chennai. All these flights have been already put into the system and will commence from August 30," the official said.
The addition of new flights will take the total number of services operated by Alliance Air to 59 flights per day. The new services are up for bookings, the official added.
Alliance Air is one of the five airlines that has been awarded 128 routes by the government under its regional connectivity scheme.
It began the first flight under the scheme with a flight to Shimla from New Delhi in April this year.