Delta’s Iceland flight is the first new international route at Logan since the pandemic began
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The COVID-19 pandemic grounded Delta’s growth plans, as it did with the rest of the aviation industry.
But new daily Boston-Reykjavik, Iceland, flights that started Thursday at Logan Airport represent an important milestone: After a year of playing defense at Logan, Delta is going on the offense again.
Henry Kuykendall, Delta’s East Coast senior vice president of operations, said the flight to Iceland, an important leisure destination, is its first new transatlantic route to take off from any US airport since the pandemic began.
It’s also the first new international route to be launched out of Logan since COVID-19 hit, although several carriers have started new domestic flights this spring. The Iceland flight debuted a day after Logan leader JetBlue announced its flights to London from Boston would begin in summer 2022, a delayed start. And it comes roughly two weeks before American launches its own flights out of Logan to London’s Heathrow airport, although that route had been announced before the pandemic and then significantly postponed because of it. (American currently makes Boston-London flights available through a code-share arrangement with British Airways.)
COVID-19 brought international travel to a screeching halt at Logan Airport. But there are signs it’s picking up
In 2019, Delta was soaring at Logan, with more than 140 daily flights — and hopes of hitting 200 by 2021. It had passed American in market share at the airport the previous year to become the No. 2 airline in Boston. And it was closing in on JetBlue’s dominant position.
The pandemic changed that a bit: JetBlue still leads the pack at Logan, with 39 percent of passengers carried so far this year, but American is ahead of Delta again, with a 20 percent market share versus Delta’s 16 percent, according to statistics tracked by the Massachusetts Port Authority.
This summer, Kuykendall expects Delta will offer 85 daily flights out of Boston, a nearly 40 percent drop from its pre-pandemic peak. He said it’s not clear when Delta will get back to that level. (The airline industry, in general, is expecting to return to 2019 levels by sometime in 2023.)
After recalling all of its furloughed employees during the past two months, Delta is now on a hiring spree in Boston. The Atlanta-based airline hopes to hire about 200 people for customer service and ground-crew jobs based at Terminal A, adding to its existing Logan workforce of about 1,300.
Kuykendall also pointed to other encouraging stats for the company. About 60 percent of Delta’s US workforce is vaccinated, and about 75 percent of its customers say they will be vaccinated by Memorial Day. The company was shedding $100 million a day last year, but is now close to breaking even again. It anticipates serving about 3 million passengers across its system on Memorial Day weekend, or 10 times the number it carried a year ago.
“Those are tailwinds we didn’t expect to see in May,” Kuykendall said. “We’re bullish on Boston. We’re committed to the city. We have a great partner here in Massport. We’re going to continue to grow at the airport.”
Delta’s rise also mirrors the return of activity at Logan. About 1.4 million passengers, still mostly leisure travelers, trekked through Logan in April, compared with nearly 1.1 million in March, and only 95,000 in April 2020 during the thick of the pandemic shutdowns.