In Face of Sanctions, British Airways, Air France Cancel Tehran Routes
Ahead of more restrictive United States sanction on Iran in November, both British Airways and Air France announced that they would be cancelling their service next month to Iran due to financial considerations, The Jerusalem Post reported Thursday.
In announcing the end of its service to and from Tehran, British Airways described the route as “currently not commercially viable.”
Similarly, Air France said that it would end flights to Iran September 18 because of “the line’s weak performance.” A spokesman elaborated, “as the number of business customers flying to Iran has fallen, the connection is not profitable any more.”
The German carrier, Lufthansa, said that it intended to continue flights to Iran.
However in July, both Dutch carrier KLM and Austrian Airlines announced that they were ending flights to Iran.
In 2016 Air France granted exemptions to female and gay flight attendants, allowing them not to fly to Iran due to discriminatory practices. Female crew members, who did not want to submit to mandatory head coverings and gay crew members, who feared prosecution and punishment were exempted from serving on the route.
Earlier this month, the United States reimposed some sanctions on Iran that had been lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal, which the U.S. formally withdrew from in May. When he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, President Donald Trump said that since the deal was agreed to Iran’s “bloody ambitions have grown even more brazen.”
U.S. National Security Advisor Ambassador John Bolton said at a Jerusalem news conference earlier this week that Iran’s increased economic isolation has led to “the reductions of resources available to the regime,” and that “we think is already manifest to some extent in constraints on the Quds Force in Syria and Iraq, and perhaps also in its assistance to the Houthis in Yemen.”
[Photo: John Crowley / Flickr ]
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