| Latvia's Airbaltic carrier likely to start flying to US in 2010 |
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| Friday,December 05,2008 Posted: 17:02 BJT(0902 GMT) |
| From:Baltic News Service Article type:Original |
RIGA, Dec 04, BNS - Latvia's Airbaltic national carrier will probably start flying to the US in 2010, the airline's president Bertold Flick told BNS.
"We are planning and considering launching flights to the US, but the existing situation is not beneficial. I think that we will wait until the situation improves and launch the flights to the US not next year but two years from now," Flick said.
The Airbaltic head indicated that the decision of starting the flights has not taken yet. "The decision on starting the flights to the US has not been taken yet, but we do not want to take the risk of launching such flights in the given circumstances," Flick explained.
He added that Airbaltic would not have to buy new planes to start flying to the US, as its existing aircraft were suitable for such Trans-Atlantic flights.
The US lifted the visa regime with Latvia as of Nov. 17.
Uzbekistan Airlines has been serving the Tashkent-Riga-New York route for four years already.
Airbaltic serves direct passenger routes from two Baltic capital cities -- Riga and Vilnius, as well as offers direct flights between Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad and Copenhagen, Latvia's southwestern port city of Liepaja and Hamburg, as well as Liepaja and Copenhagen. In the first ten months of 2008, Airbaltic flew 2.207 million passengers, which was 31 percent more than during the same period in 2007.
Airbaltic, established in 1995, belongs to the Latvian state (52.6 pct) and Scandinavia's SAS airline (47.2 pct).
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Bilateral Visits