Hawaiian Beefs Up Sydney Daily With New Airbus

Hawaiian Airlines newest aircraft, the 294-seat Airbus A330-200, is seen flying above Hawaii. (PRNewsFoto/Hawaiian Airlines, Chad Slattery)

By Sonia Isotov

Starting in May 2012, Hawaiian Airlines is upgrading its Sydney-Honolulu daily flights with a new and larger Airbus A330-200 aircraft.

Not only will Hawaiian Airlines be the only daily on its Sydney-Honolulu route starting this Wednesday, December 14, but it will be using its current wide-body, twin-aisle Boeing 767-300ER aircraft, immediately boosting its available seats by 40% and adding approximately 12,000 seats on the route between now and the transition to new A330 aircraft.

Come spring, the larger wide-body, twin-aisle A330s, which seat 294 passengers in a two-class cabin, 30 more than the B767s, will further increase Hawaiian’s Sydney-Honolulu seat capacity by 11% per flight, or nearly 11,000 seats annually – the equivalent of 41 additional B767 flights.

“This week we will be providing Australian travelers with more seats to book their flights to Hawaii by going daily with our Sydney-Honolulu service, and within a few months we’ll add more seat capacity and enhanced onboard amenities with our fleet of new A330 aircraft,” Mark Dunkerley, Hawaiian’s president and chief executive officer, in a written statement.

Hawaiian currently has five A330s in service and will add four more A330s by mid-2012, enabling the airline to upgrade its service on the Sydney-Honolulu route, and to launch new services including daily, nonstop flights between Honolulu and New York City, which begins June 4, 2012.

Hawaiian has a strong commercial partnership with Virgin Australia, enabling passengers from around Australia to connect in Sydney with Hawaiian’s flight to Honolulu. The airline also operates a daily average of 150 flights between Honolulu and Hawaii’s neighbor islands.