Thanks to a strengthened partnership between American and Alaska, American Airlines is expanding in Seattle which has led to the introduction of a new gateway to India from the US. American Airlines will soon be launching direct long haul flights from Seattle to Bengaluru on their B789’s. I’m quite intrigued to know as to why they’ve decided to introduce this route but nonetheless I couldn’t resist trying it out and ended up doing so in the American B772ER!
To answer you question why AA is introducing this route is because both Seattle and Bengaluru are big economical cities so they decided to fly between such those big cities.
Beautiful pictures as always! Finally nice to see someone flying this route.
Bangalore is one of American Airlines’ most requested destination by its customers. They were likely planning to fly LAX to India, but they aren’t able to feasibly do it without massive restrictions due to range, so they chose Seattle instead. The 787-9 is expected to do a LAX-SEA-BLR-SEA-LAX routing so it’s like flying LAX-BLR with one stop.
The two cities have a fair amount of daily passengers travelling each way thanks to some family and business traffic, so there’s already existing demand. There’s also a high chance American secured a corporate contract for this route, which is why they’re still planning on launching it next year despite COVID-19.
If they were basing this on economical cities, Mumbai and Delhi top the list and would have definitely been the better option. That being said, I probably do know why American had to resort to Bengaluru and that could be due to lack of slots at Delhi and Mumbai since Delta serve Mumbai and United serve both Mumbai and Delhi
Edit: Ishrion has probably hit the jackpot with his answer
Adding on to @Ishrion American is now using Seattle for all of its flights to Asia and Oceania. American will serve LAX for domestic and flights to Mexico.
Not at the moment. AA will still operate LAX to Tokyo, Auckland, Sydney, and possibly Christchurch. Though, they dropped LAX to Hong Kong, Beijing, and plan to move Shanghai to Seattle, so there’s likely going to be more Seattle to Asia and possibly Oceania growth in the future
