Originally Posted by
irishguy28
This would probably have been inevitable if, as is possible, Etihad wishes to ramp up service to the US, using Alitalia to operate services from Europe to the United States, in co-operation with feeder flights from Etihad themselves, and from airberlin/Etihad Regional.
Will be interesting to see Etihad's reaction to the new challenges in Germany (for those not familiar with the situation, it looks like they cannot use Air Berlin as a feeder slave to Abu Dhabi as they intended to do... making AB obsolete for them...)
Without any doubt, there is demand between Italy and the US, good old Clark called the Italian market 'underserved' from the US trying to justify his 7/7 service between Milan and New York.
So far, AZ fed a lot of passengers into CDG, especially to LAX the number used to be amazingly high, actually high enough to try nonstop service on their metal some years ago. IIRC, it used a three digit number daily just to LAX through MXP and CDG.