Originally Posted by
halls120
That was the part that surprised me, using that particular airframe.
Originally Posted by
hirohito888
Possibly added lift for cargo. I wonder how much of this is due to the new US military bases in Philippines and driving some government traffic to there.
Cargo? MNL isn't a big manufacturing hub. Government traffic for new bases, maybe, but are those bases really going to be operational in that timeframe? And I can't imagine the GSA is approving business class 60 times a day each way.
Originally Posted by
HkCaGu
(LAX-HKG will be 789, i.e. not a lot of cargo capacity compared to the 77W.) Everyone remembers the Russian closure (hence no ORD/EWR) and forgot about the "dictator". The lack of US-PRC flights isn't going to be resolved soon--and will likely outlast the Russian closure.
But that goes both ways: the demand for business travel to China has been dropping. Even if you assume that HKG is really intended as a proxy for mainland China travelers -- and, excepting Pearl River Delta travelers, why wouldn't they transit TYO instead? -- the same geopolitical forces that have limited US-PRC nonstop flights have also killed the business case for a lot of US-PRC travel.