Emirates adds US routes to revive challenge shelved

Emirates, the biggest international airline, will add flights to Seattle and Dallas in a revival of plans to establish a major route network to the world’s largest economy that it shelved after the 2001 terror attacks. Emirates will begin daily services from Dubai to Dallas starting Feb 2 and to Seattle from March 1 and may add US cities including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, President Tim Clark said Wednesday in an interview. Passenger numbers at Emirates have surged fivefold in a decade, making it the world No. 1 by international traffic. Hubs in Paris, Frankfurt and London are already under pressure as the carrier diverts long-haul passengers through Dubai, and Clark said the US market could be targeted using Airbus SAS’s A380 superjumbo, of which it has 90 on order offering 45,000 seats. “We’ve always had fairly ambitious plans for the US and this is part of that,” Clark said by phone from Dubai. “It’s an immense market. There will be more to come, including increased frequencies and bigger planes. We have ideas for the East Coast, the north-south axis in the center and for the west.” The Gulf carrier will also open its own first- and business-class lounge in San Francisco in November, having previously shared a United Airlines facility. Emirates currently serves New York, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, so that the two new routes and those under consideration would triple the number of US destinations. The carrier had originally planned to operate 20 Airbus A340s to the US about 10 years ago, but dropped the strategy following the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Clark said. “We’ll hear an increasing amount of noise from the US carriers,” said Chris Tarry, an independent aviation analyst who has followed the industry for almost three decades. “There are always a lot of comments when Emirates goes into new markets and I don’t expect the US to be any different.” American customers flying from Seattle and Dallas will be able to connect with flights to destinations across the Middle East, Asia, India and Africa via Dubai, Emirates said in a statement. Services will initially be operated using Boeing Co. 777s, of which Emirates has the biggest fleet, though there’s potential to shift those and other US routes to A380 operation as deliveries of the double-decker accelerate, Clark said. While the airline has taken delivery of only six planes in the past six months, it has 52 due in the next 18 months or so and is accelerating network expansion accordingly, the executive said. Including Dallas and Seattle, nine new routes are being added between Nov. 1 and March 1, the executive said. “The A380 will be an option for all US operations post- 2013, when the plane will have a higher takeoff weight, so that routes such as Dubai-Los Angeles become a distinct possibility,” he said. “And most US airports are A380-capable or will be.” While travelers from the US West Coast are likely to prefer more direct trans-Pacific flights to East Asia, hubbing from there via Dubai will be competitive to destinations including India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as to the wider Middle East and East Africa, Clark said. The Emirates model of operating three waves of departures from Dubai also cuts the gap between flights, so the “elapsed time” may be shorter than the distance suggests, he said. “As the emerging-market economies around Dubai expand, particularly India, they could really pick up business,” said Nick Cunningham at research company Agency Partners in London. The overlap with routes directly served by US carriers may not be so great, Clark said, though the expansion plans may “hurt” their partners in the three global airline alliances. Emirates is comfortable growing its network even as economies slow, Clark said, predicting that “demand for air travel will continue to grow over the long term in spite of the many challenges the industry faces.”