China Southern Resumes Guangzhou-Delhi Flights Sept 21

China Southern Airlines will resume daily direct flights between Guangzhou and New Delhi from September 21, 2026, ending a suspension that has lasted roughly six years, the airline confirmed this week. The restart makes China Southern the third major Chinese carrier — after Air China and China Eastern Airlines — to bring back scheduled passenger service to India in 2026, deepening a slow but steady thaw in direct air links between the two countries.

The announcement lands just days before Chinese President Xi Jinping is due in India for the BRICS Summit, a scheduling proximity that Indian and Chinese outlets have both noted, though airlines and officials have not explicitly tied the commercial decision to the diplomatic visit.

What China Southern is launching

According to the carrier's published schedule, China Southern will operate one daily round trip between Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi and Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, using Boeing 737 narrowbody aircraft rather than a widebody. Flight CZ359 is scheduled to depart Guangzhou at around 3:35 pm local time and land in New Delhi at approximately 7 pm. The return service, CZ360, is expected to leave Delhi around 8:00–8:20 pm and arrive back in Guangzhou at roughly 4:15 am the following day.

The route was last served before a broad shutdown of India-China air links that followed the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent military standoff along the two countries' Himalayan border, which began in 2020. Direct flights between the two countries stayed frozen for years even as other travel and trade ties gradually reopened, making the current run of restarts — four routes now confirmed operational or announced within a matter of months — a notable shift.

Following the Guangzhou-Delhi restart, China Southern's own release indicates the carrier expects to be running more than 100 weekly flights across eight round-trip routes covering South Asia, a figure that reflects its broader regional network rather than India-specific capacity alone; the airline has not broken out how many of those weekly frequencies touch Indian airports specifically.

The wider pattern of restarts

China Southern's move is the latest in a sequence of India-China route revivals spread across Chinese and Indian carriers through 2026:

China Eastern Airlines restarted direct service between Kunming and Kolkata on April 18, 2026.
Air China resumed its Beijing-Delhi route in April 2026, becoming the second Chinese-flag route to reopen.
China Southern itself had already launched a daily nonstop Kolkata-Shanghai service on March 30, 2026, ahead of the Guangzhou-Delhi restart.
On the Indian side, IndiGo became the first Indian carrier to resume flights to China, starting a Kolkata-Guangzhou route on October 26, 2025, followed by a Delhi-Guangzhou service from November 10, 2025.

Taken together, these restarts mean that by the time China Southern's Guangzhou-Delhi flights begin on September 21, both countries will have multiple carriers flying multiple city pairs for the first time since the pandemic-era shutdown — a contrast with the single-route, single-airline arrangements that characterized earlier, more tentative reopening attempts.

Sequence of India-China direct route restarts through 2026, largely rebuilding a network that had been shut for roughly five to six years

Why the routes went dark in the first place

Direct flights between India and China were suspended in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down international aviation broadly, but unlike most bilateral markets, the India-China air corridor did not reopen once pandemic-era travel restrictions elsewhere eased. Instead, it stayed closed for years longer, a delay widely attributed to the deterioration in bilateral relations following a deadly clash between Indian and Chinese troops along their disputed Himalayan border in mid-2020. Civil aviation officials on the Indian side had periodically said discussions on resuming direct flights were "progressing," language that recurred in Indian coverage for well over a year before any route actually relaunched.

The freeze meant that travelers between India and China were routed almost entirely through third countries — commonly Southeast Asian or Gulf hubs — for years, a workaround that added cost, time and an extra layer of visa complexity for business and family travel between two of Asia's largest economies.

The market opportunity, and its limits

For Chinese carriers, restoring direct India access reopens a market of over 1.4 billion people that had been serviced only indirectly for years, at a moment when several Chinese airlines — like much of the industry across Asia in 2026 — have been contending with rising fuel costs and margin pressure on other parts of their networks. A revived India corridor offers incremental long-haul and connecting traffic without requiring new aircraft deliveries, since the initial routes are being flown with existing narrowbody and widebody fleet already in service.

That said, the scale of the restart so far remains modest relative to pre-2020 India-China connectivity, which included multiple daily widebody frequencies on some city pairs. The current wave is built from single daily narrowbody frequencies on most of the newly announced routes, including China Southern's Boeing 737 operation on Guangzhou-Delhi, suggesting airlines on both sides are testing demand incrementally rather than immediately restoring pre-pandemic capacity.

It is not yet confirmed whether China Southern intends to add frequency or deploy a larger aircraft type on the Guangzhou-Delhi route if the initial daily service performs well; the carrier's public statements to date describe only the single daily round trip beginning September 21.

Guangzhou itself is a strategic choice of endpoint rather than an arbitrary one. As the hub of China Southern's home base and one of mainland China's largest aviation gateways, Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport already carries substantial onward connectivity to Southeast Asia, Australia and other domestic Chinese cities, meaning Indian travelers using the new Delhi service gain a one-stop option to a wide range of secondary destinations that previously required routing through Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore or Gulf hubs. That connecting value is likely to matter as much to the route's commercial case as origin-and-destination traffic between Delhi and Guangzhou themselves, particularly in the early months while direct demand between the two cities is still being tested.

The visa and demand backdrop

Even with flights restored, the practical experience of traveling between India and China has not simply snapped back to pre-2020 norms. Business and leisure travelers on both sides spent years relying on indirect routings via Southeast Asian or Gulf connecting hubs, and visa processing between the two countries has at various points been described by Indian officials as improving only gradually rather than fully normalizing. Airlines restarting routes are, in effect, betting that suppressed demand built up over five to six years of closure — from separated families, students, traders and businesses with supply-chain ties across the two economies — will materialize quickly enough to sustain a daily narrowbody service before frequencies are reconsidered.

That bet is not guaranteed to pay off immediately. Industry watchers who track prior India-China route reopenings have noted that initial load factors on newly restarted long-haul and medium-haul international routes often take several months to build, especially where the underlying travel documentation and diplomatic relationship is still normalizing rather than fully settled. China Southern has not published a target load factor or a review timeline for the Guangzhou-Delhi service, and neither the airline nor Indian aviation authorities have indicated whether the route benefits from any temporary bilateral traffic-rights allowance tied to the current diplomatic thaw, as opposed to a standing entitlement under the existing India-China air services agreement.

What to watch next

Several open threads will determine whether this run of restarts becomes a durable recovery of India-China air links or stalls at its current scale:

Whether other Chinese carriers, or Indian carriers beyond IndiGo, announce further city pairs in the coming months.
Whether frequencies on the newly launched routes are increased once initial demand data is available.
Whether the broader diplomatic climate — including the outcome of discussions around President Xi's visit to India for the BRICS Summit — translates into any formal bilateral air services agreement changes, as opposed to the current pattern of individual carrier announcements.

None of the airlines involved has publicly linked its commercial scheduling decisions to the diplomatic calendar, and this article does not speculate on any such connection beyond noting the reported timing.

China Southern Becomes Third Chinese Carrier to Restore India Flights, Reviving Guangzhou-Delhi Route After Six Years