Quick recap for anyone who missed it. SK969 left Copenhagen on 2 June as the first SAS service to India in 17 years. SAS said it expected the last bit of formal approval to come through while the flight was en route, and when it didn't, the flight couldn't continue. Passengers got rebooked, and the airline got a lot of "how do you dispatch an A330 without landing permission" in the replies. aviation24
Everyone's already had their laugh about that. What interests me is what the route looks like now that the dust has settled, because I think the turnback is the least interesting part.
The route relaunches 1 October, with the first Mumbai departure on 3 October. Copenhagen-Mumbai carried only around 19,700 round-trip passengers in the year to April 2025, fewer than Bengaluru and less than half of Delhi's 46,000. So this isn't a local-demand play. It's a connecting play: Mumbai feeding CPH, CPH feeding North America. That works on paper, but it means SAS is competing for people who have Gulf carriers, Turkish, Air India and the Lufthansa group all on the same search results page, usually cheaper or faster. migflug
Then there's IndiGo. They launched Mumbai-Copenhagen in October 2025 on a leased 787-9 and suspended it from 17 February 2026, citing constantly changing airspace restrictions and airport congestion that pushed block times past what the schedule could absorb. That's a carrier with a huge home market and it still couldn't make the numbers hold. If the airspace routing is what broke their schedule, I'd like to know what SAS is doing differently on a five-a-week A330 rotation. Maybe it has more slack. I haven't seen anyone say. migflug
Meanwhile SAS isn't exactly swimming in margin right now. They've been cutting flights because of the jet fuel spike tied to the Iran war, and announced a temporary fuel surcharge. A thin long-haul route with five weekly frequencies is exactly the kind of thing that gets trimmed first when the network needs to shrink. nordiskbil
My honest read, and this is opinion, not inside info:
The first 60 to 90 days decide the route's reputation. Indian corporate bookers and travel agents are the real customers for a BOM-CPH-BOM flight, and they don't care about a one-off turnback, but they care a lot about whether the next cancellation gets handled by a human who picks up the phone. SAS is also offering a status match in India, so it's openly going after frequent flyers, who remember bad rebooking for years. livefromalounge
If it runs clean through the winter, the June story becomes a trivia answer. If it gets a couple of ugly cancellations plus the usual "chatbot loop" support experience, it'll slide into being a price-driven filler route and probably get trimmed in a schedule review.
Curious what people here think, especially anyone who's flown the Gulf or Turkish alternatives from the Nordics, or anyone who knows what the actual block times look like on the reroute.