With the addition of the city of Amsterdam, the total number of European destinations offered by Qatar Airways will grow to 34 – just under a quarter of the airline’s total route map. The carrier has witnessed rapid growth in its 17 years of operation and now operates a fleet of 146 aircraft to 146 business and leisure destinations across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, North America and South America.
United Arab Emirates (UAE) low-cost carrier Air Arabia is to set up an operation in Jordan after agreeing terms to acquire a 49 per cent stake in local carrier Petra Airline. The agreement will see the carrier relaunched as Air Arabia Jordan before the end of the first quarter of this year and will see Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport established as a fifth hub for the expanding low-cost business.
The inaugural Routes Middle East & Africa is designed to build on the success of the regional Routes Africa 2014 event, and will take place in the Kingdom of Bahrain from May 31 – June 2, 2015.
The new Toronto - Delhi link is an example of a route made possible thanks to the excellent operating economics that modern generation airliners now offer and certainly would not have been able to be served on a sustainable manner using older aircraft types.
Since Etihad Airways commenced daily flights between Abu Dhabi and Melbourne in March 2009 the airline has carried more than 900,000 passengers on the route.
United Arab Emirates (UAE) national carrier Emirates Airline is to introduce a third daily rotation on its route between Dubai International Airport and Birmingham Airport in the UK. The new flight, operated by a Boeing 777-300ER will commence from August 1, 2015, and opened for reservations earlier today (December 22, 2015).
With the additional flights, Qatar Airways will now have four early morning departures connecting via Doha to Europe and the Americas and four early evening departures connecting to flights in the Asia Pacific region. A mix of morning and evening flights means convenient connections for passengers from Salalah to key markets in the Qatar Airways’ route network of 146 destinations.
The deployment of the Super Jumbo will take effect from May 1, 2015 and will mean that alongside its partner Qantas, a total of seven daily A380 services will operate from Dubai to Australia from next summer.
Its latest growth for the first quarter of 2015 will see another three destinations added to its route map, further expanding the carrier’s footprint to 89 destinations in 46 countries. These comprise flights to Hargeisa (Somaliland), Chennai (India), and Nejran (Saudi Arabia).
In what is described as a new era of cooperation between the two national flag carriers, SAA will introduce the daily link from March 29, 2015, which will complement Etihad Airways’ existing flights between the two cities to offer a combined double-daily frequency on the route.
The frequency growth will see Qatar Airways boost capacity to Barcelona by 32.1 per cent in 2015, while total capacity into Spain will increase 30.4 per cent to almost 360,000 seats in each direction. According to MIDT data, the airline carried an estimated 458,000 passengers on its flights to and from Spain last year.
It appears that Qatar Airways will inaugurate scheduled passenger flights with its new Airbus A350XWB from January 15, 2015 on the Doha – Frankfurt route. The Gulf carrier, the launch customer for the next-generation airliner, has already revealed the German city would be the first destination for the aircraft, but it has yet to confirm when the flights will launch.
Emirates first introduced flights to Dar es Salaam in conjunction with its services to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. However, in March 2006 the airline initially split the route and introduced its first non-stop flights to the Tanzanian city, later establishing a dedicated daily flight to the destination from December 2006.
The new flight will launch from March 29, 2015 and will introduce a morning rotation to further support local and transfer traffic on the route. It will be operated using an Airbus A320 configured with 12 Business Class and 132 Economy seats.
Boston is currently the fourth largest US - Tel Aviv origin-destination market without non-stop service behind San Francisco, Chicago and Miami and averages an estimated 91 passengers a day in each direction, generating more than $45 million in ticket sales last year alone.
We've all sat and contemplated airports and their IATA codes for long enough, and some of their origins have remained a mystery. Why is Chicago O’Hare Airport ‘ORD’ and Orlando Airport ‘MCO’? At Routesonline we have done some digging and found out some of the answers to those burning questions.
Today, Emirates fleet investment in Africa tops $7 billion with operating costs of over $2 billion and it currently operates to 22 passenger and six dedicated freighter destinations in Africa perating over 160 flights across the continent each week, connecting African economies and markets with Dubai and beyond to a global network of over 140 major cities.
Bahrain, which is located in the Arabian Gulf, has a history of aviation that dates back to the early 1920's. Historically it has acted as a gateway between the East and West providing a natural transit destination for early trade routes and a strategic hub for the Northern Gulf.
The carrier’s entry into Tanzania is no real surprise as the country is a regional hub for tourism in East Africa and in 2013 the country welcomed over one million tourists. According to the Tanzania Tourism Board (TTB), this figure looks set with to double with two million tourists forecast by 2017.
