Originally Posted by johan rebel
KL683 AMS-YUL-IAD-MEX operated Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays.
I know that KL wanted to fly to many other US destinations, but they battled for years to get landing rights. The Netherlands is a small country, and could not offer much in the way of reciprocal rights. Not many US carriers were interested in flying to EIN or MST!
johan
Now it would be very interesting to learn if KLM had Seventh Freedom rights on YUL-IAD or IAD-MEX and Eighth Freedom rights on flights within the US ?? That is especially of importance for the huge run you described in your original post with the AMS-ZHR-MAD-LIS-CCS-CUR-PAC-GYE-LIM routing.Imagine not, then you start at Schiphol with 120-150 or so pax and drop off a few handfuls at any stop, then you end up flying GYE-LIM with a full crew, but only a half dozen pax...
Would like to know the economical figures of those flights, can imagine that they had those rights in SA, but really sure about NA and Canada...
Beside that the NL was certainly among the first European countries to privatise its airline ( at least partly and always keeping a Golden Share ) together with the UK, but NL was less restictive with traffic rights , especially to AMS, which was also a huge driving factor for the expansion and status quo of Schiphol and consequently Amsterdam as a tourist destination, KLM certainly always played its part...
Funny that you have mentiond EIN and MST, for the latter one I can remember flights were the number of pax onboard the Atr 42 was closed to being outmatched by the number of customs officers at the destination
