(Yicai) Oct. 14 -- US carrier Delta Air Lines said it will restart non-stop passenger flights from Los Angeles International Airport to Shanghai Pudong International Airport starting next June.

Delta plans to operate three flights between LA and Shanghai every week, the Atlanta-based company announced on Oct. 12, increasing its weekly non-stop flights between the United States and China to 17. The carrier also flies the Detroit-Shanghai and Seattle-Shanghai routes. 

Delta will use some of the additional flying rights agreed between the US and China in February to restart the LA-Shanghai route. The two countries agreed then to further restore air links upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, with 50 weekly round-trip flights for Chinese airlines and 50 for US carriers.

While Chinese airlines have already filled their 50 weekly flights, their American counterparts have yet to fully use their quota.

The number of flights between China and the United States remains lower than before the pandemic, partly because of the higher cost of longer flying times to avoid Russian airspace as a result of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And the principle of reciprocal flying rights means that if US airlines do not increase the number of flights, Chinese carriers cannot expand theirs further.

But Delta's LA-Shanghai route does not pass through Russian airspace, so there is no cost impact from a detour, Yicai found.

Many foreign airlines have started adding flights to China. Kenya Airways will launch a not-stop Nairobi-Beijing flight, Saudi Airlines will open a Dammam-Beijing route on Oct. 28, and Ethiopian Airlines increased the number of flights from Addis Ababa to Guangzhou to 10 per week at the end of last month.

These new flights are from Africa or the Middle East, regions with a higher recovery rate in air travel to China after the pandemic. The number of international routes from West Asia, Central Asia, and Africa to China in the first nine months of this year has exceeded the level of 2019, according to data from Flight Manager.

China's outbound passenger flights have only recovered to 70 percent of 2019's level. Southeast Asia remains the region with the most routes, but at around 200 their number has nearly halved, while those to the US and Canada have dropped below half.

Editor: Martin Kadiev