Delta Air Lines has announced an expansion of its China network this winter, adding one weekly frequency to its Detroit-Shanghai route and four weekly frequencies to the Seattle-Shanghai flights. In March, the airline will relaunch Los Angeles-Shanghai flights.

Finally expanding to China

The floodgates between the United States and China have opened, with Delta becoming the latest carrier to announce the expansion of its Chinese network. Last week, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that starting October 29, the number of flights between the two nations would double. United Airlines also announced its return to Beijing, with daily flights from San Francisco beginning in November.

Delta announced today that beginning October 29 it will offer ten weekly flights to Shanghai-Pudong International Airport (PVG). The ten flights will be split between its hubs at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, with daily and thrice-weekly flights, respectively. Both routes were launched in recent months, with the DTW-PVG route operating two times weekly and the SEA-PVG route operating three times.

Photo: Delta Air Lines

Jeff Moomaw, Delta's Vice President for Asia - Pacific, said demand is increasing to China,

“As demand continues to increase and the busy travel season to the Asia-Pacific region commences, the Delta team is ready to welcome even more travelers to the region this winter, providing our award-winning customer service on every journey."

In addition to the expansion of the Detroit and Seattle routes to Shanghai, Delta will relaunch flights from Los Angeles International Airport to Shanghai, a route it has not flown since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. From March 2024, Delta will fly LAX-PVG four times weekly.

Delta highlighted that its passengers flying to China can take advantage of its codeshare with China Eastern Airlines to connect to several Chinese cities. Together, the two airlines operate more than 260 weekly codeshare flights.

Below is a summary of today's announcement:

Pre-pandemic China network

Before the pandemic, specifically in December 2019, Delta had 330 flights scheduled between the US and China. At the time, the airline operated six routes to just two Chinese destinations, Shanghai and Beijing. Its two busiest routes were from Detroit, offering 9,180 seats by deploying its Airbus A350-900s on the daily flights. Its next-busiest route, Seattle-Shanghai, had about 1,000 fewer seats, on which Delta deployed its Airbus A330neos.

Photo: vaalaa | Shutterstock

At the time, Delta had its fleet of Boeing 777 aircraft, which it used on its routes from Los Angeles to Shanghai and Seattle to Beijing. In March 2020, Delta announced it was retiring the Boeing widebody type, and made it clear its focus was on Airbus' latest-generation widebodies, the A350 and A330neo.

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