AA Looks at Plan B to Get Travelers to Beijing

Mr. Joyner said American's competitive position out of Tokyo will improve when it moves this week into the same terminal as the one Japan Airlines uses. In addition, JAL in a month will become a full-fledged member of Oneworld, the global airline alliance headed by American and British Airways PLC.

"Japan Airlines has been working with us as we develop and expand our code-share to go a lot of different places all over Asia, in China and some of the secondary cities and down into Southeast Asia," Mr. Joyner said. "Tokyo is a big piece."

But getting a nonstop into a major city is clearly better than connecting. In its application for the D/FW-Beijing route, American cited markets where the number of travelers had increased greatly after it launched nonstop service, including flights from D/FW Airport to Guatemala City, Guatemala, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The number of travelers between Dallas/Fort Worth and Beijing increased from 6,470 in 1999 to 13,390 in 2005. But American estimated that with nonstop service, the number of travelers between the two cities would triple, jumping to nearly 41,000. American expected to hang on to almost 33,000 of them.

Earlier missteps

American can only hope it fares better on winning a D/FW-Beijing route than its experience in getting Transportation Department approval for a route between Chicago and Tokyo.

As in the recent China case, American rallied an impressive group of supporters as it lobbied for that Chicago route, one of the mostly highly prized into the rapidly growing Japan market in 1990. But Transportation officials picked United, and American didn't win its own route between Chicago and Tokyo until 1998.

And getting a route is no guarantee that it will be a moneymaker. In 1990, American bought Continental Airlines Inc.'s route to Tokyo from Seattle for $150 million, and the Transportation Department awarded American a Tokyo route from San Jose, Calif., the same year.

Despite its hopes that both routes would pay off, American abandoned the Seattle route in January 2002 and grounded the San Jose flight last Oct. 28.

Similarly, it fought hard to get a route linking D/FW to Osaka, Japan, finally winning the rights in 1998. But it stopped service in 2001 because of losses, and, after resuming service in 2005, canceled it again in October.

American and other carriers are hoping that new service to China will pay off and that travel between the two countries will continue to increase.

According to the Transportation Department, the number of travelers between China and the United States increased from 547,110 in 1999 to 1,396,780 in 2005.

Most analysts expect that growth to continue - assuming the Chinese economy doesn't cool off.

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