The Courant is running a story on the festivities taking place in my back yard today — Bradley seeing the start of nonstop air service to Amsterdam:
At 5:25 p.m. today, Bradley and Connecticut head back to the future.
Northwest Airlines Flight 98 - a 160-seat Boeing 757 - is scheduled to depart for Amsterdam, direct and nonstop, with a water-cannon salute. The flight commences Bradley’s first-ever daily passenger service overseas, and comes as old-line legacy airlines have been adding more profitable international routes to their schedules.[...]
Whether Jain’s task becomes easier or harder depends on the outcome of Northwest’s Hartford-Amsterdam experiment, she said, and it could take 18 months of solid results before the airline industry believes that real demand for overseas service exists here.
Even Northwest, which emerged from bankruptcy May 31, is hedging its Hartford bet, using a relatively small, single-aisle aircraft on the route and flying just once a day round-trip at the start.The million-dollar question is, Who will fill these seats day after day?[...]
Northwest has not committed itself to operating the Hartford-Amsterdam route for any defined time period, and executives would not discuss minimum standards for success. They said today’s flight is full and advance bookings are better than expected, but would not disclose any data.
The Hartford metro area is of course the American home to United Technologies and ING, both of which have major operations in central Europe, and will presumably appreciate being able to avoid Logan and JFK. However, I suspect that there are several insurance industry oriented folks in the area who are still jonesing for nonstop flights to London and Bermuda.