ISLAMABAD: A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight landed in Pakistan on Monday, bringing home 155 citizens stranded in Doha due to a wave of coronavirus-related flight cancelations in recent weeks.

On Saturday, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced Pakistan would fly special flights to bring home over 6,100 citizens stranded in Gulf countries. Thousands of Pakistanis have been unable to return home in recent weeks due to flight cancelations by Middle Eastern operators following recent travel bans in their countries.

“PIA’s relief operation to bring Pakistanis who got stranded because of cancelation of flights of other airlines is underway, and our first flight arrived this morning [on Monday] with 155 passengers from Doha,” PIA spokesperson Abdullah Hafeez Khan told Arab News on Monday.

“We have allocated eight special flights for Qatar, two for Bahrain and added 2,000 additional seats from the UAE to Pakistan,” he explained, adding “PIA is ready to add more flights” if need be.

“We have more flights from Middle East countries tomorrow,” Khan said.

“PIA flights were upgraded from Airbus to 777 (as per existing schedule) to take approximately 6132 passengers from Dubai, Shariah, Doha and Bahrain on 18 PIA flights,” the CAA said in a statement on Saturday, adding that ten flights would depart from the UAE, bringing home 3,394 passengers between July 5 and July 16.

Another 2,016 Pakistanis would be brought home from Qatar from July 6 to July 18, and 722 from Bahrain between July 9 and July 11.

PIA will use Boeing 777 aircraft from its fleet as the wide-body airliner can accommodate more passengers than regular Airbus planes operated on these routes.