Primera continues to plot for 2019 and it’s Boeing 737 MAX 9 Fleet – with plans to grow out a long haul network from Madrid.
Primera Air Boeing 737-800 at Birmingham Airport – Image, Economy Class and Beyond
The new plans call for routes from Madrid to:
- Boston (MA) (3 times a week)
- Newark (NJ) (Daily Service)
- Toronto, Canada (4 times a week)
The Newark route will commence on the 16th July 2019, Boston on the 16th August 2019 and Toronto on the 17th August 2019.
Primera is going head to head with airlines with the routes – competing with United Airlines at Newark, Iberia to Boston and Air Canada to Toronto – which could make this a very tough battle for the airline.
It seems with 18 Boeing 737 MAX 9s on the order books, Primera Air is betting big with them, and their network potential The airline has already highlighted it wants to operate from Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt to transatlantic destinations
Providing the planes are delivered on time (which didn’t happen with the Airbus A321neos, causing the summer madness that lead to dropped routes left right and centre), they might stand a chance.
But in terms of connection feed – that’s a different story. All the other airlines listed have good feed either into Madrid, or at the destination airport. Primera Air will be relying solely on origin and destination traffic.
Could it be the weakness in the Primera Air plan… or are they trying to run before they walk with the unreliability they’ve had this year?
Time will tell.
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I don’t know how Primera is still in business. The must spend a fortune in compensation under EU law, with all the delays/cancellations on their transatlantic routes.
The ETOPS requirements on Transatlantic Routes make them harder to take off on-time with a limited fleet, and the distance of those routes make the EU compensation amounts skyrocket.
They should stick with their bread-and-butter intra-Europe flights, which are shorter distance without ETOPS requirements,