British Airways (BA, London Heathrow) has announced it will relocate its daily services from Beijing Capital to Beijing Daxing International on October 27, 2019.
The British carrier said in a statement that despite the change, it will continue to operate the route from London Heathrow using B777-300(ER)s in summer and B787-9s in winter.
Previously, LOT Polish Airlines (LO, Warsaw Chopin) and Finnair (AY, Helsinki Vantaa) announced they would add services to Daxing on top of their existing flights to Beijing Capital.
The Polish flag carrier will retain its 3x weekly services to the current airport and add 4x weekly flights to Daxing starting on October 28, 2019. It will use B787-8s and -9s on the route. Finnair, for its part, will add 3x weekly services to Daxing from November 4 using A330-300s, while retaining its daily flights to Beijing Capital.
The new Daxing airport is set to become a hub for China Eastern Airlines (MU, Shanghai Hongqiao) and China Southern Airlines (CZ, Guangzhou), while Air China (CA, Beijing Capital) and Hainan Airlines (HU, Haikou) will continue to operate predominantly from Capital airport. The Chinese government gave free choice to foreign airlines as to which gateway they would prefer to operate from but is, in fact, trying to lure them to switch to Daxing.
According to the Sina news agency, the deputy director of the transportation department of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), Yu Biao, said during a recent industry briefing that foreign carriers could count on there being more readily available, attractive time slots at Daxing which will allow them to build more optimal schedules from the airport. Capital Airport is severely slot constrained at present, although capacity will be freed up following the relocation of the Chinese major airlines to Daxing.
Beijing Daxing is expected to open to commercial traffic at the end of September this year.
