KQ to fly to direct New York from October

   

Kenya Airways will begin daily flights between Nairobi and New York in October. The flight will cut 7 hours of travel between the two cities.

Those keen top travel in October on the maiden flight can now start buying tickets whose sale begins on Thursday. Kenya Airways has already secured a landing slot at JFK.

The trans-Atlantic flights, scheduled to depart Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) at 10:30pm every day, will last 15 hours arriving at JFK Airport at 6.30 am EAT. The return flight will depart JFK at 1: 30 PM landing in Nairobi at 10.30 am the next day.

Passengers traveling to JFK will arrive at 6:30am, in time for morning meetings, while the return flight from JFK will depart at 1:30pm and arrive in Nairobi at 10:30am the next day.

Each flight has a capacity of 234 passengers – 204 in Economy and the rest in Business Class of the national carrier’s Dreamliner aircraft.

Kenya Airways, known in short as KQ, has shelved plans to operate the flights through a code-share partnership with US carrier Delta Airlines, its SkyTeam partner.

Delta and three other airlines - Virgin Atlantic and KLM Air France- are currently involved in lengthy merger forcing Kenya Airways to go it alone for now.

 KQ could add another flight to the US through West Africa, once the merger between her code-share partners is over.

 For the Kenya government which has worked hard for the direct flights, it’s a sigh of relief. Phew it’s over! The government expects the direct flights to boost exports to the US and help jumpstart the tourism sector. An estimated100,000 Americans visit Kenya each year.

Also read http://eaers.blogspot.co.ke/2014/07/how-soon-kqs-direct-flights-to-us.html