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Taipei, Nov. 8 (CNA) Taiwan based-StarLux Airlines Co. said Sunday it plans to continue the company's market expansion in North America despite the COVID-19 pandemic, confirming it has applied to the Civil Aeronautics Administration for 15 flight related routes to the region.
Those routes are between Taiwan and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Guam, Honolulu, Seattle, San Jose, Ontario, New York (JFK), New York (Newark), Washington D.C., Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Miami and Boston, said airline spokesperson Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維).
Nieh said the move represents a preparatory market deployment, but whether the plan is realized depends on the market and delivery of the planes it ordered.
If all goes well, the routes could potentially be launched in 2022, Nieh said.
The airline will fly 17 wide-body A350 aircraft (nine A350-900s and eight A350-1000s) from Airbus on the routes, with the first scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2021.
With the purchase, StarLux would become the second of Taiwan's carriers, after China Airlines, to operate A350-900s and the first to operate A350-1000s.
As StarLux has positioned itself as a luxury airline, all of the aircraft will offer first class seats, with the exact seating arrangement to be determined by the end of the year, Nieh said.
(By Yu Hsiao-han and Lee Hsin-Yin）
Enditem/AW
