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Delta expands flight service from LAX

By David Mildenberg, Bloomberg News
02:48 PM PDT, May 10, 2007

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Delta Air Lines is adding 21 daily flights to nine North American cities at Los Angeles International Airport, where it is building up a hub to feed into international service.

The expansion starts July 1, 2007 and will give Delta, the fourth-largest carrier at LAX, 100 daily departures from Los Angeles to 48 nonstop destinations. That's double the service it offered a year earlier, the Atlanta-based airline said in a statement.

The new service in Los Angeles includes four daily flights each to Denver, Phoenix and San Jose, plus two flights each to San Francisco, Sacramento and Oakland. Flights are also planned to Boise, Idaho; Spokane, Wash.; and Vancouver, Canada.

ExpressJet Airlines will operate the routes for Delta using 50-passenger Embraer 145 regional jets.

Delta, which exited bankruptcy protection on April 30, 2007, is expanding potential connections to international routes in Los Angeles, where it already has flights to 17 cities in Mexico and Central America. It is preparing to offer future service to Asia from LAX

"Delta doesn't have a franchise in Asia," Chief Financial Officer Edward Bastian said Wednesday at an investor conference in New York. Most of its international expansion in the next few years will involve flights to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, he said without providing specifics.

Major U.S. airlines are beefing up international service, where they can avoid competition with low-fare carriers such as Southwest Airlines.

Delta has added more than 55 flights to 34 destinations from Los Angeles in the past year, including those announced today, Glen Hauenstein, the carrier's executive vice president of network planning and revenue management, said in the statement.