Korean Air blooms with summer schedule changes

Korean Air will roll out new routes to the US and Japan and add frequency on key growth routes in its northern summer schedule. Non-stop flights between Seoul and the US East Coast city of Boston start April 12 in co-operation with joint venture partner Delta Air Lines. The five-times-weekly flights will use the airline’s 269-seat Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners offering first, business and economy class. The aircraft’s first class and Prestige Class business seats offer a generous 75-inch seat pitch while Korean’s economy seats offer more legroom than many other carriers with a pitch of 33 to 34-inches. The airline’s president, Walter Cho, has said he will not reduce economy seat pitch because of the importance of providing passengers with comfortable seating during long flights. READ Our passenger reviews of Korean Air. The Sky Team alliance partner is also retiming its Seoul Incheon-Seattle flight to a 4:40 pm departure to take advantage of Delta’s strong US network and offer more travel options to passengers. A new service to the picturesque Japanese tourist destination of Asahikawa, Hokkaido, will start June 1 and will also run five times a week. Other changes include an increase in frequency between Seoul and Istanbul, Turkey, from four a week to five and the resumption of seasonal direct flights to Russia. The airline will resume flights to the Russian city of Irkutsk from April 22 and to St. Petersburg from April 28. While the flights do not operate over winter, Koreans says they provide convenient flight options for leisure and business passengers heading to Russia and Northern Europe during summer. The airline said it would also maintain its three-times weekly service to Zagreb, Croatia,  started in 2018. Korean Air  earlier in March celebrated its 50^th anniversary with more than 10 billion kilometres on the clock and a fleet that is 21 times bigger than when it was privatized in 1969. READ: Korean celebrates 50 years of spectacular growth Korean launched in 1969 with eight aircraft and now has 166. Annual passenger numbers have burgeoned from 700,000 to 26. 8 million and the airline estimates it has carried more than 7.14 billion people since its inception as well as 40.54 million tons of cargo.