The connecting passenger flows at either end of the route will be key to the success of this route. The local demand between Santiago and Melbourne is around 16,000 bi-directional O&D passengers per year, but when you expand to Chile to Australia that grows five-fold to around 100,000 passengers and up to 585,000 passengers when you consider the whole of Central and South America and the Pacific region.
As Airbus celebrates the milestone inaugural test flight of the new A350-1000, the largest variant of the A350XWB family, Routesonline looks at approaching two years of commercial operations with the smaller A350-900.
The carrier will start operating the A350 XWB commercially in January 2016 between Sao Paulo and Manaus, Brazil, as part of continued training and crew familiarisation. This will be followed by operations from Sao Paulo to Miami in March and then to Madrid in April.
This decision, which has already been included in the strategic plans of LATAM Airlines Group for the future, will see TAM add between four and six new regional destinations to its network every year. To support its plans it is in the “advanced stages of negotiations” with aircraft manufacturers to acquire 18 aircraft and options for 12 more.
We took a look at the top 20 airlines in the world by operating carrier, analysing the network capacity in December 2013 against the same month this year.
