Where Will Icelandair Fly Its 737 MAX Aircraft This Summer?

Icelandair is to serve 12 North American destinations and 24 across Europe in mid-August. Its Boeing 737 MAX 8s and 9s will be used on 22 routes, with its only widebodies – B767-300ERs – on eight. Its Keflavik hub is alive and well.

Icelandair will be the 14th-largest airline across the North Atlantic this summer, with its Europe route map seeing 24 destinations along with 12 in North America. The carrier has been aided by Iceland reopening to vaccinated travelers, who don’t have to quarantine or be tested, which is key for those visiting the country. That said, Icelandair remains very focused on its strong hub-and-spoke operation connecting Europe with North America.

12 destinations in North America

Icelandair will serve 12 destinations in North America in mid-August, with 10 airports in the USA and two in Canada. Boston and Seattle will be the joint-highest on an airport-basis with 10 weekly departures each. Of course, it’s a different story at city-pair level, with New York number-one with 14 departures from both New York JFK and Newark served.

Icelandair’s North America network will have 75 departures in this week, down by 44% over the same week in pre-pandemic 2019. This was from both route cuts (Anchorage, Edmonton, Kansas City, Montreal, Philadelphia, and San Francisco) and frequency reductions at those that remain. The latter is obviously mainly from coronavirus, but also somewhat from reducing the number of waves each day at its Keflavik hub.

And 24 across Europe

Some 24 international routes comprise Icelandair’s Europe network in this August week, with Copenhagen top, as always, because of the links between Iceland and Denmark. Meanwhile, Barcelona has just a once-weekly offering, with the Spanish city one of the very few scheduled destinations that is for point-to-point demand only rather than connections. It is therefore timed for this.

While its Europe departures are down by 29% over 2019, Heathrow and Berlin both have the same number of flights now as then. And Frankfurt is down by just two a week. Both Heathrow and Frankfurt are among a number of routes that have flights that arrive into Keflavik late evening for point-to-point demand, supplementing earlier-in-the-day core services.

Boeing 737 MAX or 767?

Icelandair has scheduled its Boeing 737 MAX 8s and 9s to operate 22 routes in mid-August. Boston and Copenhagen are down for 10 weekly departures each, the most, while Newark should see seven and Chicago, some 2,944 miles away, five.

In contrast, eight routes should see its 262-seat B767-300ERs, with Amsterdam, Boston, Washington, and JFK having seven departures each. In Europe, they’ll be used on certain flights to Frankfurt, Heathrow, Berlin, and Munich.

MAX 9s scheduled

Although it may change, its MAX 9s are down for 13 routes. In order of expected weekly departures, they are:

1. Boston
2. Malpensa
3. Newark
4. Dublin
5. Helsinki
6. Manchester
7. Amsterdam
8. Copenhagen
9. Frankfurt
10. Gatwick
11. Heathrow
12. Madrid
13. Chicago

Keflavik hub

While point-to-point (non-connecting) travel is very important to Icelandair, so too are connections. For this, it has a highly well-timed wave structure, where one wave has one arrival bank and one departure bank), as shown below.

It’s very straightforward. Early arrivals come from North America and feed Europe-wide services. They then return late afternoon, before services to North America depart. There are exceptions, notably the late evening arrivals for point-to-point demand. The hub works as in this example:

• Seattle-Keflavik: 1550-0615+1
• Keflavik-Zurich: 0720-1305
• Zurich-Keflavik: 1405-1555
• Keflavik-Seattle: 1705-1755

Overnighting in North America

Eagle-eyed readers will see that Icelandair’s departure from Seattle leaves before it arrives. That is because longer routes (Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Orlando, Denver) remain overnight in North America before leaving the next day. This increases costs, although it’s offset by Icelandair’s B757s having very low ownership costs. And it’d be nowhere near as costly as if they flew right back with no feed opportunities.

This is one consequence of its Keflavik hub having fewer waves now, with another being more bunching of departures and the use of many narrowbodies, especially during summer.