FlyOne, the Tashkent-based private carrier, has opened reservations for its twice-weekly flights between Tashkent and Delhi from November 06, 2026, deploying its Airbus A321neo on the route. Meanwhile, Indian carriers are forced to stay away due to airspace closures
FlyOne, the Tashkent-based private carrier, has opened reservations for its twice-weekly flights between Tashkent and Delhi from November 06, 2026, deploying its Airbus A321neo on the route. With this announcement, FlyOne becomes the third Uzbek carrier, after Uzbekistan Airways and Centrum Air, to operate scheduled non-stop services between Uzbekistan and India, while Indian carriers are forced to stay away from the market due to geopolitical issues. Another private Uzbek carrier, Qanot Sharq, has been interested in operating to Delhi and could well start before FlyOne, making the sector hyper-competitive with four carriers from Uzbekistan flying to Delhi.
FlyOne Asia is part of the Modovian FlyOne group with a presence in the form of affiliate airlines and subsidiaries in Armenia and Uzbekistan, while Qanot Sharq has been on an aggressive expansion path through 2026, adding widebody capability with its first Airbus A321XLR delivery, pushing itself on longer flights into Europe. With flights to Delhi, not only do Uzbek carriers aim to get a piece of the increasing India – Uzbekistan market, but also try to take a slice of the transfer traffic between India and Europe, along with points in Central Asia.
How Uzbekistan built up Delhi capacity while India pulled back
Uzbekistan Airways has flown to Delhi for decades, going back to the airline’s early post-independence expansion in the 1990s, when the flag carrier extended its network from Tashkent to key Asian capitals including Delhi, with its fleet of Soviet era aircraft that it inherited from the fall of the Soviet Union. Over the years, the tourism industry opened up in Uzbekistan, while Delhi became the regional magnet for trade as well as medical tourism. Uzbekistan opened up to tourism post-2015, and it was also the time when the airline went ahead with modernisation. Lately, the country allowed private participation in the airline sector, leading to airlines like Qanot Sharq and Centrum Air taking wings.
More from BusinessAfter expanding services to Delhi, Uzbekistan Airways expanded to Mumbai and now has a codeshare agreement with Air India. The airline operates seasonal services to Goa and also connects Delhi with Namangam once a week.
Centrum Air, the second Uzbek entrant, opened Tashkent-Delhi on October 2-3, 2025, initially twice weekly using A320-family aircraft, and within six months had already added a third weekly frequency from March, 2026. The airline has been explicit that it sees Delhi as core to its strategy of positioning Tashkent as a connecting hub between India, Central Asia, Europe and the Middle East, offering onward connections to Almaty, Moscow, Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Copenhagen.
IndiGo’s story on this route is where the picture turns. IndiGo launched Delhi-Tashkent in September 2023 as part of its early push into Central Asia and the Caucasus, alongside Almaty and Tbilisi. Demand was strong enough that IndiGo doubled frequencies on all three routes through August 2024, moving toward daily operations, and even added a second India gateway, launching Mumbai-Tashkent from August 1, 2025. But the timing of that Mumbai launch is itself revealing: it came only after IndiGo had already been forced to suspend its original Delhi-Tashkent and Delhi-Almaty flights from late April 2025, when Pakistan shut its airspace to Indian carriers following the Pahalgam terror attack and India’s Operation Sindoor. With Pakistani airspace closed, IndiGo’s narrow-body A320neo fleet could no longer make the detoured routing work from Delhi, and suspensions that were meant to last until May 7 were extended to June 14, 2025, before the airline pivoted to Mumbai as a workaround gateway.
That workaround did not last either. From late January 2026, rising US-Iran tensions forced IndiGo to cancel flights to Tbilisi, Almaty, Baku and Tashkent from both Delhi and Mumbai, as Iranian airspace closures added yet another detour that its narrow-body fleet could not absorb economically. The suspension, first set to end February 28, 2026, was pushed to March 28, 2026, and IndiGo’s own-metal flights to Tashkent have effectively not returned since; tickets sold today under IndiGo’s code on this sector are largely codeshare seats on Uzbekistan Airways aircraft rather than IndiGo’s own A320s.
Why the vacuum matters for both sides
Delhi is not just another point on the map for Central Asian carriers; it is the largest and most connected aviation gateway in South Asia, feeding into dozens of domestic Indian cities and offering onward international links that smaller Central Asian capitals simply cannot replicate. For Uzbek carriers looking to build Tashkent into a genuine east-west hub, capturing traffic between India and Europe, Russia, the Gulf and beyond, a strong Delhi service is close to essential, and that explains why all three Uzbek carriers have prioritised it over other Indian cities.
The reverse is equally true. Central Asia has become an important outbound and business market for India, driven by rising leisure travel to Uzbekistan’s Silk Road cities, growing trade and connectivity ambitions tied to routes like the International North-South Transport Corridor, and a diaspora and business community that has grown alongside direct connectivity since 2023.
Tail Note
As the Prime Minister visits Tashkent for strategic meetings, and then proceeds to Kyrgyzstan for the SCO summit, the focus will remain on more people-to-people ties, trade and co-operation. Till the geopolitical issues with Pakistan are resolved, the focus will be on Uzbek carriers playing their part in direct connectivity. What is unfolding on Delhi-Tashkent is a smaller-scale version of a pattern now familiar across India’s western and northern international map: geography-driven disruption creating room for foreign carriers to consolidate a market that Indian carriers built up in the first place. IndiGo did the hard work of stimulating this corridor from 2023 onward, growing it from a thin, twice-weekly Uzbekistan Airways service into a daily, multi-gateway market. But two back-to-back and unrelated airspace crises, first Pakistan, then Iran, have pushed IndiGo’s narrow-body fleet out of a market it cannot serve profitably without a workable routing, and Uzbek carriers have simply stepped into the gap it left behind.
Until Indian carriers induct aircraft with the range and route flexibility to work around these constraints, or until the airspace situation eases meaningfully, Uzbek carriers have every incentive to keep adding frequency on Delhi, and every reason to believe Indian travellers will keep booking them regardless of which flag is on the tail. FlyOne’s entry and Qanot Sharq’s potential entry is not the end of that story, it is the clearest evidence yet that competitors from Tashkent see a market Indian carriers currently cannot serve, and are moving quickly to make it their own.
(Ameya Joshi is an aviation analyst.)
