LONGEST AIR NEW ZEALAND FLIGHT HITS CHICAGO RUNNING

Air New Zealand’s first ultra-long-haul route to Chicago arrived almost an hour early on Friday, demonstrating to residents of the Windy City that Australasia is closer than they think.机票

The Boeing 787-9 rode the jet stream to finish the trip in just over 14 hours instead of almost 15 hours. It achieved the time savings through user preferred routes that allow it to optimize its oceanic flights to take advantage of airflows.

“Essentially the Jetstream is a fast-moving body of air and obviously we like to harness that where we can to make the flight go a lot faster,’’ said first officer Al Hanley. “It’s more efficient for us as well.’’

Bookings are ahead of expectations on the three-times-weekly service and Air New Zealand chief revenue officer Cam Wallace says the airline’s aspiration is to move quickly to a daily service.

“I’m not going to put a timeline on that, but our aspiration is to get to daily as quickly as possible and the initial bookings are better than we anticipated,’’ he said.Wallace said the airline is particularly pleased with its sales in Chicago, which are running at about 65 percent of the US total.

“Our expectation when we did the modeling is that we’d have more about 50 percent so we’re really encouraged by the bookings,’’ he said. “We want to get to more service, more quickly because clearly, that makes it a more efficient operation with crew and things like that.”

Chief executive Christopher Luxon is also confident in the future of the route and the airline’s US strategy as a whole.The route is not only Air New Zealand’s longest but also the longest from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Chicago is the Kiwi carrier’s sixth destination in North America and Luxon believes there is still plenty of untapped potential. It already flies to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hawaii, Vancouver and Houston.Last year we had about 341,000 that actually came – it grew about 7 percent – so it’s probably our third or fourth biggest market,’’ he said.

“But the upshot is there still a lot of opportunity sitting there with 34 million people who do research on New Zealand, understand what’s there and have it on their wish list.

“The biggest problem they have is their perception of distance and when we actually research them, many of them tell us they think it’s 41 hours to get here.