Malev drops transatlantic flights

Malev Hungarian Airlines has decided to cancel its two transatlantic routes and starting later this year will concentrate instead on expanding its service within Europe. Hungary’s national airline will stop offering regularly-scheduled flights from Budapest to New York as of October 25^th, 2008, while the last direct flight from the Hungarian capital to Toronto, Canada’s financial centre, will depart on September 21^st. Airline officials pointed out that the price of fuel has made these routes far too expensive to operate and as such, they have generated losses for the past several months. In fact, according to a report in Index, a Hungarian electronic journal, it now costs approximately $49,000 more for Hungary’s flag carrier to operate a single Budapest to New York flight than it did only a year ago.

As part of its restructuring efforts, Malev will also retire from its fleet two of its Boeing 767 planes, as it will no longer make any sense to keep these, once the carrier scraps its long-haul routes. From now on, the carrier will concentrate its fleet around the Boeing 737, which has proven to be an ideal choice for Malev’s most popular European routes, but it will also supplement these with Q-400 Dash turboprop planes, manufactured by Bombardier, the Canadian aerospace giant. These planes will fly on short-haul , regional routes within Central and Eastern Europe, and will eventually replace the carrier’s Canadair and Fokker planes. The airline will also use some of these new, fuel-efficient planes in an effort to strengthen its market position in Eastern Europe.

www.malev.com