United’s new Narita to Kaohsiung, Taiwan route took to the skies today, highlighting United’s continuous efforts in international expansion, particularly in East Asia. We’ve also seen United launch routes to Nuuk, Greenland, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia this year, and I’ve been impressed with United’s willingness to try these new and unique routes.
This is a daily service, and the flight schedule is as follows:
- UA837, Narita to Kaohsiung: 17:30 departure, 21:00 arrival
- UA838, Kaohsiung to Narita: 10:25 departure, 15:15 arrival
If you know anything about transpacific scheduling, you can probably see United’s strategy embedded in that route schedule. The airline is aiming to capture ongoing connections through Narita to Taiwan, inbound from the US.
Most flights from the US to Japan arrive between 13:00 and 16:00, including United’s arrivals at Narita. The airline has flights from Houston and Los Angeles arriving at 14:00, and flights from San Francisco, Newark, and Denver arriving at 14:30. These inbound passengers have options to connect to destinations such as Guam, Cebu, and now Kaohsiung, all in the afternoon.
Similarly, most departures from Narita to the US leave during the evening hours, which perfectly aligns with the 15:15 arrival from Kaohsiung.
The flights are operated by a fleet of Boeing 737-800s, which operate all of United’s Asia Pacific routes. For example, tomorrow’s Kaohsiung flight is N35260.
Over the past few days, N35260 has serviced Guam, Narita, Saipan, Airai, and Manila in addition to tomorrow’s Kaohsiung flight. They get flown around just like a 737 back in the US would.
United has a base in Guam, which used to belong to Continental before the merger (guess who flew Narita to Guam during the Continental days!). As the Guam routes aren’t doing as well since the pandemic, the airline is willing to relocate the 737s to other destinations around the Asia Pacific.
Either way, I’m glad to see the Asia Pacific get a lot of attention. We’ll have to wait and see how this Kaohsiung route does, but kudos to United for trying out something new.
Featured image by Tadayuki Yoshikawa, Aviation Wire.
