Next month sees Dutch airline KLM double the number of weekday flights between London City (LCY) and Amsterdam (AMS) from four to eight.
These additional KLM Cityhopper services start on May 15. KLM’s existing four daily weekday flights will continue as before.
The additional four flights will be operated by Irish airline Cityjet under a “wet-lease” (aircraft plus crew) arrangement. It means that Cityjet will no longer ply the route under its own banner as it does now.
These flights will, for all intents and purposes, become KLM services.
And as we reported a couple of weeks ago Cityjet will also be axing its LCY to Rotterdam service at the end of this month. But that’s not all.
Cityjet is wet-leasing two RJ85 (more commonly known at the Bae146) aircraft to KLM. And the latter will also deploy them for flights linking Amsterdam with Belfast, Birmingham, Bordeaux and Hamburg.
Further details of the services will become available in due course.
Boet Kreiken, managing director of KLM Cityhopper said: “After an absence of eight years KLM commenced services from Amsterdam to London City in February using Embraer 190 aircraft which currently operate four flights daily on weekdays. With the new wet-lease arrangement we will be able to increase our London City frequency offering greater choice for customers.”
Cathal O’Connell, CCO of Cityjet said: “We continue with our strategy of refocusing Cityjet into an airline with a strong mix of scheduled services and wet-lease operations for other airlines.”
As previously mentioned, KLM is primarily a sixth-freedom (transfer) airline and to ensure consistency it wants as many of its connecting flights as possible to carry the KLM identity.
