The Eurocontrol Industry Monitor on air transport trends
Friday 23, July 2010
European flights increased by 2.7% in June on the same month of last year. In June, Low-Cost and Business Aviation segments have been contributing to the renewed growth with increases by 11% and 7% (respectively) compared to June 09.
Passenger Airlines
As part of the Climb 2011 restructuring programme, Lufthansa plans to change the cabin seats configurations to increase seat capacity by the end of the year. Subsidiary Austrian will apply the same strategy in summer 11 (Lufthansa, 28 June).
Austrian will raise the daily number of waves from 6 to 7 at Vienna airport from winter 10/11 to increase connectivity: the potential number of weekly connections with the Austrian carrier at the hub airport will increase by 1.5% to around 20,300 (Austrian, 8 July).
bmi plans to reduce seat capacity by 22% in Europe in 2010 (compared to 2009) and to improve aircraft utilisation. The airline also decided to reduce its UK domestic operations for more profitable routes and to increase codeshare with Lufthansa and Star alliance partners (bmi, 28 June).
Subisdiary AnadoluJet will operate all Turkish Airlines domestic and international return flights from Sabiha Gökcen airport from the 2nd August (Turkish Airlines, 6 July).
Norwegian plans to increase seat capacity to 28% in 2010 (compared to 2009) mainly from introducing larger aircraft in its fleet. The budget carrier accelerates the removal of B733 and will have unitary fleet of 63 B738s by the end of 2012 targeting reductions in unit costs and emissions (Norwegian, 13 July).
Alitalia received its first (out of 2) A330-200 to be introduced into service during summer for intercontinental routes from Milan Malpensa. The aircraft will have 224 passenger seats organised in three classes (business, premium economy, economy). The carrier plans to redesign its B777’s fleet with the same interior after it has just finished modernising its short- to medium-haul fleet (Alitalia, 15 July).
Regional carrier Flybe ordered up to 140 E175 (35 firm and 105 options) for first delivery in September 2011. The new 88-seat E175s will complete the current carrier’s fleet of 74 aircraft, exclusively made of E195 and Q400. Flybe, recently co-operating with Air France (see codeshare section), aims at becoming a leading airline in European regional’s network (Flybe, 20 July).
New routes, codeshare
KLM will add three flights per week between Amsterdam and Tokyo Narita from November, which will increase the total number of weekly flights on this route to 10 (KLM, 8 July).
Ryanair will increase by 10 the number of routes from Leeds Bradford for winter 10/11 (compared to winter 09/10) amongst which Barcelona, Weeze, Gdansk and Fuerteventura (Ryanair, 6 July).
Turkish Airlines launched new operations from Istanbul to:
Finnair strengthens its position in Asia with:
Easyjet will launch 8 new routes for winter 10/11 from UK airports:
Jet2 announced new services from Newcastle to Krakow, Toulouse, Alicante and Faro in next summer’s schedule as well as a twice weekly service to Prague from November this year (Jet2, 9 and 15 July).
Air France and UK regional Flybe are to offer code-shares services, increasing the network connections between France and UK. This cooperation agreement, to take effect by the end of October, will add to Air France’s network 45 UK-French links and 17 Flybe’s domestic routes (Air France, 13 July).
Alliances, Mergers
Aegean officially became the 28th member of the Star Alliance after last year’s approval, providing alliance’s members access to Greek destinations (Aegean, 30 June).
Alitalia joined Air France-KLM and Delta as a member of the transatlantic joint venture for the next 12 years. With the Italian carrier’s addition, the venture gains 20 daily transatlantic flights to 5 US destinations from Rome Fiumicino and Milan Malpensa totalling a daily offer of almost 250 transatlantic flights and 55,000 seats (Alitalia, 5 July).
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