Icelandair to add fifth weekly Seattle flight

Icelandair will add a fifth weekly nonstop fight between Seattle and Reykjavik, Iceland next spring.

The airline started service from Seattle on July 23, with four weekly flights operating from Seattle at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The new flight will depart Seattle on Wednesdays, starting May 6.

Flights currently return to Seattle on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays, and starting in May, on Tuesdays, arriving at Sea-Tac at 5:45 p.m. Flight time is about 7-½ hours

In Reykjavik, Icelandair flights connect with flights to Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London and Paris and other European cities.

The airline announced plans for the Seattle route in March shortly after Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) said it would end Seattle-Copenhagen flights on July 31 after 42 years of flying the nonstop route.

Advance bookings were strong, according to airline spokesman Michael Raucheisen, who said last month that the airline would likely go ahead with plans to add a fifth flight sometime in 2010.

"This is opening up a whole new market for us," he said. "Based on the numbers we're seeing, it's living up to expectations."

Seattle is Icelandair's only West Coast gateway. The airline currently flies year-round from New York and Boston and offers seasonal service from Orlando and Minneapolis.

The new flights will serve mainly those connecting to other points in Europe, but the airline is allowing free stopovers in Iceland, a remote country of 320,000 close to the Arctic Circle that was one of the world's richest countries until its banking industry collapsed last year.

For information, see www.icelandair.com.

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701