The budget carrier has served the Lithuanian market for over ten years, initially with a London Stansted – Kaunus operation. It first introduced flights into Vilnius in May 2011 when it debuted services from Bergamo, Bremen, Dublin, Girona, London Stansted and Rome Ciampino. Its expanded offering will mean it will be providing over 3,000 seats per day into the Lithuanian market from the coming winter schedule.
This will be Delta’s fifth daily nonstop flight to the Asia-Pacific region and will add to existing links to Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo; the latter being served by flights to both Haneda and Narita airports. The Shanghai service was only added in July 2015, and Delta will be the only carrier to offer service to both of China’s biggest cities from Los Angeles.
The aircraft, which is configured with 86 seats and will be leased between the busy summer months of June and September 2016, will allow Air Serbia to expand its flight network with non-stop flights to Hamburg in Germany and Kiev in Ukraine being introduced from its Belgrade base. In addition, the aircraft will be deployed on the carrier’s existing Belgrade – Sofia route.
The growth will be supported through the arrival of an additional 98-seat aircraft, arriving in June, will be the 20th Embraer to join the British Airways fleet at London City. The extra routes mean that BA will have its busiest ever summer at London City Airport where it will operate over half the flights, despite speculation that it could cut its operations related to a change in ownership and charges at the Docklands facility.
Taipei-based China Airlines, which will take delivery of its first Airbus A350 XWB in July, will launch nonstop flights from Taipei to European destinations from December 2016.
India’s Jet Airways, which recently announced a strategic codeshare with SkyTeam partners Delta Air Lines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, confirmed it will close its Brussels hub and move to Amsterdam Schiphol.
As low-cost carrier (LCC) Cebu Pacific Air launches its first service to a US territory, Japan-based LCC Vanilla Air said it also intends to expand across the Pacific region.
WestJet Encore has started 3X-daily Toronto Pearson-Boston Bombardier Q400 flights, marking the regional carrier’s entrance into the Canada-US transborder market.
The Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has begun installing airfield lighting at 13 airports in order to reduce the cancellation of domestic flights.
This month easyJet will launch its first flights to Montenegro, its 32nd country in its network and an emerging destination with limited current international connectivity. The country was a well-known tourist spot in the 1980s and has both a picturesque coast and a mountainous northern region. Yet, the Yugoslav wars that were fought in neighbouring countries during the 1990s crippled the tourist industry and damaged the image of Montenegro for years.
JetBlue has more than doubled its activities from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International over the past ten years and has grown capacity 78.3 per cent since the start of the decade, an average annual rise of 15.7 per cent. Its departure capacity was up 15.1 percent last year as Albany, Baltimore, Charleston, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Providenciales were all added as new destinations.
The Middle East region—which is leading growth in the aviation industry—will have a plan to ease air traffic congestion at major hubs, especially Dubai, by the end of the year, Emirates Airline president Tim Clark told ATW.
The official inaugural flight will leave Mauritius today with an important delegation. The ”Air Corridor” project aims at creating enhanced air links between Africa and Asia using Mauritius and Singapore as hubs.
