Stories by David Delagarza

ASSOCIATE EDITOR - DENVER, CO. David is a civil engineer by training and trade, but his head is in the clouds. A licensed private pilot and skydiver, he grew up around airplanes and airports. He calls Colorado home, but travel is in his blood. You can find him sitting in coach with his wife and toddler on the way to their next great adventure. Email me at davedlg@airlinereporter.com

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The Geographic Reach of the ME3 airlines in the US. Graphic: David Delagarza | AirlineReporter.com

It seems like over the last few years, there have been almost weekly announcements of new routes from one of the ME3, the three major middle east airlines (Qatar, Emirates, and Etihad), to the United States. As of now, these three airlines fly, or have announced, routes from the middle east to the thirteen U.S. cities.

As a Denver-based flyer, I have heard a lot of talk about whether we can expect to see some exciting new liveries at Denver International Airport in the near future. I keep finding myself going back and forth between thinking, “yes, we’ll hear an announcement any day now” and “nope, it’s never going to happen.”

Warning: lots of analysis and numbers below. If you want the short version, skip down to the bottom. Otherwise, settle in and let’s look at some numbers.

As an engineer, I decided to do what I do best – start analyzing things and putting some numbers on paper. The first thing I did was chart the geographic reach of the ME3 within the United States. That resulted in the map above. The green areas are within 100 miles of an ME3-serviced airport, the yellow areas are 100-to-250 miles out, orange areas are 250-to-500 miles out, and the red areas are more than 500 miles away from any ME3-serviced airport.

Combining this information with the 2010 U.S. Census data gives us some interesting numbers. Of the U.S. population in the lower 48 states, approximately 44% live within 100 miles of an ME3-serviced airport, 64% live within 200 miles, and 95% live within 500 miles.

When two AirlineReporter writers decide to go on a weekend guys trip, the possibilities are endless. The thing is – we don’t mind long flights, crazy routing, or extended layovers – after all, that’s all part of the adventure.

It’s amazing how much ground you can cover in a few days, if you really want to. Once we made the decision to go somewhere, Associate Editor, Blaine Nickeson, and I spent a few weeks scouring the internet for decent airfares. We considered various destinations across five continents. Finally, something really interesting (and cheap!) popped up: Denver to Tokyo on United’s 787-8 connecting on to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on ANA’s 787-8.

One stop from Denver to a city nearly on the other side of the world? Oh yeah, this is the kind of stuff the Dreamliner was built for.

Airline: All Nippon Airways (NH) Aircraft: Boeing 777-300ER Departed: Houston Intercontinental (IAH) Arrived: Tokyo Narita (NRT) Class: First Class Seats: 1D & 1G Length: About 14 hours It seemed to happen every day for two weeks –  I’d glance out my office window in Denver at about noon, just in time to see the contrail of a high-altitude wide-body fly by.  Being […]

Airline: Thai Airways International Aircraft: Airbus A380-800 Departed: Tokyo Narita (NRT) Arrived: Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (BKK) Class: First Class Seats: 1E & 1F Length: About 6 hours My wife and I recently embarked on a major bucket list trip to Thailand.  Since this was a rare sans-toddler trip, we decided to go all-out and burn pretty much all the miles and points we could […]