On 2 June this year, SAS flight SK969 lifted out of Copenhagen bound for Mumbai, ending a seventeen-year absence from India. Four hours later, somewhere over Azerbaijan, it turned around and flew home.

The aircraft had departed without final clearance from India’s civil aviation regulator, on the expectation that the paperwork would land while the aeroplane was in the air. It did not. The passengers spent about twelve hours airborne and got off in the city they had started in.

SAS will try again on 1 October. This time the airline says everything is in place.

A return to India, not a restored route

The seventeen-year figure is accurate, but it needs a footnote. SAS flew to Delhi until 2009, when the financial crisis pushed the airline back to its European core, and to Calcutta until 1985. It has never flown to Mumbai. This is a new city pair, not a resurrected one.

Why Mumbai, and not Delhi

On raw local demand, Mumbai is the odd choice. Copenhagen–Mumbai carried roughly 19,700 round-trip passengers in the year to April 2025 — fewer than unserved Bengaluru, and well under half of Delhi’s 46,000. Delhi is also already served nonstop from Copenhagen by Air India, three times a week.

The answer is the map. Russian airspace has been closed to European carriers since 2022, and it has hurt SAS badly: its departures to Asia excluding the Middle East fell by 71 percent between 2019 and 2025, from 1,285 to 378. Almost every Asian city SAS used to serve now sits behind an expensive detour.

Mumbai does not. A routing south of the Caucasus and across the Gulf reaches western India with only a modest penalty, which makes it one of the few long-haul Asian markets where a Scandinavian carrier can still make the arithmetic work. The aborted June flight tracked over Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Black Sea, Georgia and Azerbaijan — no Russian airspace involved.

The airline that just gave up on this route

Here is the part most coverage has missed. SAS is not opening virgin territory. IndiGo launched Mumbai–Copenhagen on 8 October 2025 using a leased Boeing 787-9, and suspended it from 17 February 2026 until further notice, citing continually changing airspace restrictions and airport congestion that stretched block times beyond what its schedule could absorb.

So SAS arrives on an uncontested nonstop route, seven months after a much larger operator concluded it was not worth flying. The asymmetry is the point: airspace closures bite Indian carriers flying west far harder than they bite European carriers flying east, which is precisely why one airline left and another is arriving.

It is a connecting route wearing a point-to-point badge

Van der Werff’s last clause is the commercial thesis. Five weekly widebody rotations are heavy for 19,700 local passengers, and SAS is not pretending otherwise: the announcement pushes connections to New York, Boston and Toronto, and the Mumbai turnaround is a deliberate four and a half hours to feed the transatlantic bank.

The wider Denmark–India market was about 155,500 two-way passengers in 2024 and grew 23 percent year on year, but only around 33,000 of those flew nonstop. The rest connected through Dubai, Doha or Frankfurt. That connecting pool, not the local one, is what SAS is aiming at.

The alliance context helps. SAS left Star Alliance on 31 August 2024 and joined SkyTeam the following day. Air France-KLM holds 19.9 percent and has agreed to raise that to 60.5 percent, a deal still awaiting regulatory clearance as of this month, with the Danish state retaining 26.4 percent. IndiGo, meanwhile, has partnerships with Delta, Air France-KLM and Virgin Atlantic — so the Indian end of this market is being fought over by carriers who are, in other rooms, partners.

On 1 October the aeroplane goes again. The difference this time, the airline says, is that the paperwork went first.

A look at the SAS A330-300 cabin — the aircraft type assigned to the Mumbai route.

Sources: SAS Group newsroom, Simple Flying, AeroTime, Live From A Lounge, TTR Weekly, Air France-KLM, Cirium data via Simple Flying