Bmi leases aircraft to allow Heathrow service increase
February 14, 2008Bmi has announced the lease of two aircraft to allow it to increase the capacity and frequency of a number of its services from London Heathrow.
The airline has leased two Boeing 757-200s and, as a result, from May 1 it will be offering a new direct service to the Kazakhstan city of Almaty, reducing the current journey time to the destination by two hours.
From the same date it plans to offer direct flights to the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, with journey times reduced by an hour and an extra weekly flight introduced to bring the number of scheduled departures to four per week.
The aircraft will also allow increased capacity on bmi's new direct service between Heathrow and Tel Aviv, scheduled to being on March 1, with more seats available on six-times weekly flights.
Other changes permitted by the leasing of the Boeing 757s include improved daily schedules and flight capacity from the London airport to Tehran, Ekaterinburg and Yerevan, that redirection of services to Bishkek via Almaty instead of Yerevan, but also the suspension of the current service to Dakar.
Nigel Turner, the airline's chief executive, said: "We strongly believe that in order to continue the development of the mid haul network, now is the time to upgrade capacity and the aircraft range on certain routes that will clearly benefit from non-stop services."
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