Originally Posted by
sbm12
Assuming you mean the NRT-PVG slot, it is unclear to me that the bilateral allows that to be moved to the US mainland, though I'd have to do some digging to be sure.
Originally Posted by
flyerCO
I highly doubt NRT-PVG can be moved to anything other then maybe HND. To do otherwise would require a change to the US/China agreement. Now I could see DL moving it to HND and operating MSP-PVG direct via the MSP-HND flight. I'm not sure if the Japan/China governments would allow it, but that would seem the most likely.
Originally Posted by
flyerCO
However there were slots available for US-PEK/PVG flights. With the request to add LAX-PEK, all US-PEK/PVG nonstop slots would be assigned. Thus why I don't believe that it could be moved to a US-PVG flight.
Longboater and
jrkmsp are correct; DL could move its NRT-PVG flight to any mainland gateway it desires.
Originally Posted by
jrkmsp
It can be moved. The US-China bilateral treats all frequencies operated by US carriers into China equally, so NRT-PVG is the same as SEA-PEK in the eyes of the treaty. Conceivably someone could open a route case with DOT to try to force Delta to give up the frequencies back to the pool before reallocating them, but that would be unprecedented. Once an airline has these sorts of frequencies, they're fairly free to move them around gateways.
Not exactly. DL flies NRT-PVG with old, unrestricted frequencies, which are not tied to specific gateways. DL could move NRT-PVG to any mainland gateway tomorrow and there's no risk of losing the frequencies nor any risk of a competitive route allocation case. These frequencies are old NW frequencies from pre-2005 when only NW and UA were permitted to fly to China.
Frequencies gained in the post-2004 competitive route cases are tied to the gateways in the applications (eg, all AA and CO frequencies plus all UA and DL frequencies won since 2004) and cannot be moved without permission of the DoT.