Brussels Airlines to start US service in 2012

[SNam]

According to De Standaard, Brussels Airlines will start flights to the US and will add a sixth A330 to the fleet.
More news to come!

http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail. ... 110704_033

Greetings,

[andorra-airport]

A bit more news (in Dutch) here : http://www.metrotime.be/nlnewsbelga.htm ... d=64092351

and in French: http://www.rtbf.be/info/economie/detail ... id=6401863

[liebensd]

According to De Standaard, Brussels Airlines will start flights to the US and will add a sixth A330 to the fleet.
More news to come!

Some more news according to deStandaard

A sixth A330 will be added, this will create an additional 70 jobs. New York is mentioned in the article but according to Brussels Airlines CEO Bernard Gustin it is not decided witch the destination will be.

Greetz,

Dave

[Boavida]

Finally !

[chrisflyer]

Any insider info (or speculation) on the destination?

My guess is EWR or ORD.

JFK seems unlikely as there are three (soon two) carriers on the route and both AA and DL have downgraded from 763 to 752. The Washington market is I think sufficiently covered by the daily UA flight.

EWR is a likely as there has been talk of a double daily BRU-EWR for a while (and Jet Airways is leaving the market), and with EWR a major UA hub it makes a lot of sense. The latter applies also to ORD.

Chris

[Sikiri]

Jet Airways is leaving the market

Did you read this somewhere? It would not surprise me, since I always found their move to fly to both EWR and JFK a bit surprising.

[sn26567]

In former threads, there was talk of Boston, with San Francisco another possibility.

[fets]

What about BOS? it's a hub for JetBlue and Lufthansa is a stakeholder in both companies. LH may be able to "escape" the revenue-sharing it has with UA/CO/AC on TA flights this way. If SN joins this alliance, it doesn't really matter where they fly, since the risks are spread over all the partners anyway.

BOS is also the shortest flight to any major hub in the US, which could help with airplane utilization.

[Joost321]

Does anyone have an idea when was the last US flight of Sabena and with which aircraft?

thx!

[Malaysia]

Direct flights to Houston would be nice too, as now you have to transit via EWR or JFK

[Boeing767copilot]

Three cities, four airports in the pipeline:

1) JFK or Newark
2) Boston
3) Houston

[travellover]

To restore a BRU-JFK evening flight should be very interesting, knowing there are no competitors at that time and it should fill in a gap on the US-Belgium market.But ensuring the connections between Africa and the USA requires SN to arrive at BRU at 8.45 am at the latest and to leave in the late morning.

[BrightCedars]

Nice interesting development!

I would expect A330 #7 to come soon to increase the offer both to the US and to Africa as well.

Don't count JFK KO just yet, whatever many may say, it's a very important destination and port.

Otherwise BOS sounds nice, I think SFO would be too bold (West Coast, definitely less than daily service).

HOU should be a possibility in the future but I think it would rather be in the form of UA/CO shifting hardware there and SN taking over an EWR frequency or some trading like that.

[sn26567]

Does anyone have an idea when was the last US flight of Sabena and with which aircraft?

Not sure I know the answer, but at the time of its demise Sabena had daily flights to New York JFK (twice daily), Newark, Washington, Chicago, Boston and Dallas, mostly on A330-200 (one of the daily JFK flights was on A340-300).

Does it mean that the future A330 could be a -200 model?

[Treeper]

as far as I know, one of the only profitable destinations to the US by Sabena was to Cincinnati (CVG). so maybe in a later stadium, after the JFK/Newark line, we'll see that one being opened?

[SNam]

What about triangular flights but maybe that is not what customers are waiting for for such route.
BRU-BOS-JFK-BRU

And the evening flight, if the main purpose of this route is feeding the African network would an evening flight be logic? On the other side like mentioned before there is a gap in the afternoon.

Greetings,

[sn26567]

Trends.be seems to think that New York is the most probable destination: http://trends.rnews.be/fr/economie/actu ... 04-07-2011

[Joost321]

Thanks André!

Joost

[fretn]

Can't wait, SN is really busy with a 'remonte'!

[Ozzie1969]

I find it unbelievable that Brussels Airlines doesn't fly to the US. Nice to see that that situation is almost over.