Etihad Airways launches service Wednesday to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, making it the third airline from the Middle East to begin flying to North Texas in less than three years.
Etihad will start with three flights a week — on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays — to D/FW Airport from its Abu Dhabi base in the United Arab Republic. It expands to daily service on April 16.
Etihad will use Boeing 777-200LR airplanes outfitted with 225 seats.
D/FW will be Etihad’s sixth U.S. destination, following New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco. The San Francisco flights, launched last month, use the aircraft of partner Jet Airways.
Helping out Etihad at D/FW is its codesharing relationship with the biggest operator there, American Airlines Inc. American will put its “AA" code and flight number on Etihad’s flights to Abu Dhabi. However, Etihad is just a marketing partner of American, while competitor Qatar Airways is a full-fledged member of Oneworld, the global airline alliance headed by American and British Airways.
In arriving at D/FW, Etihad joins Qatar and another Middle Eastern carrier, Emirates Airlines, in serving North Texas.
Emirates was the first, beginning its D/FW service on Feb. 2, 2012. Between then and Sept. 30, 2014, the carrier’s flights have carried 460,364 passengers in and out of D/FW Airport.
Emirates, which is based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, launched its service using its 266-seat Boeing 777-200LR jets. However, on Oct. 1, it upsized to an Airbus A380 airplane with 489 seats.
Qatar started daily service from Doha, Qatar, to D/FW on July 1 with a Boeing 777-200 equipped with 259 seats. Qatar carried 41,699 passengers during its first three months.
Based on those numbers, both Emirates and Qatar have averaged filling 87 percent to 89 percent of their seats since they began D/FW flights.
Airport officials have said that strong traffic to and from India in particular has helped fill the airplanes as passengers connect through the Middle Eastern hubs.
However, when Etihad announced the service last year, it said it expected that “much of the U.S. demand will initially come from the oil and gas sector, which has significant connections with Abu Dhabi and the Middle East, as well as from the 20 Fortune 500 companies based in Dallas/Fort Worth and the 52 Fortune 500 companies based in Texas.”
While Etihad currently flies 105 aircraft, it has more than 200 airplanes on order, including the Airbus A380 and A350, the Boeing 787 and the Boeing 777-X. It carried 11.5 million passengers in 2013.
Follow Terry Maxon on Twitter at @tmaxon.
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