Also pledges to keep Cincinnati hub -- for now

Delta Air Lines – which now includes Northwest – has laid out plans to add a number of new international routes to its network next year, mostly beginning in June, including new service to Europe and the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Some of the plans are subject to various government approvals.

• Across the Pacific, Delta said it will add non-stop service five times a week between its Salt Lake City hub and Tokyo Narita as well as a new, daily New York JFK-Tokyo Narita non-stop and a second daily roundtrip to Narita from Atlanta. Delta said it will also offer daily connecting service beyond Tokyo to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

• To Europe and the Mideast, Delta’s plans include new non-stops from New York JFK to Gothenburg, Sweden; Valencia, Spain, each running four times a week; and to Prague, Czech Republic, three times a week, as well as seasonal daily service to Zurich and the addition of a second JFK-Tel Aviv non-stop four times a week.

• Delta said it will add several destinations in Africa, including non-stops from its Atlanta hub to Nairobi, Kenya (four a week) and Cape Town, South Africa (three a week; this flight, operating via a stop in Dakar, Senegal, replaces Delta’s JFK-Cape Town service); as well as new service from Atlanta to Monrovia, Liberia (once a week); Abuja, Nigeria (twice weekly); Luanda, Angola (twice weekly); and Malabo, Equatorial Guinea (once a week), all operating via a stop at Cape Verde. Also on the list is new JFK-Lagos, Nigeria service operating five times a week. And Delta will replace its current Atlanta-Dakar-Johannesburg route with daily non-stop Atlanta-Johannesburg flights.

Delta noted that these new Delta services will be in addition to Northwest’s previously announced plans to begin new Seattle-Beijing and Detroit-Shanghai non-stops in March 2009. (Separately, Northwest reportedly plans to discontinue its non-stop Seattle-London service, which started in June 2008, on January 8.) To feed traffic into its international network, Delta said it will add 14.5 percent more capacity between its new, combined domestic hub network in 2009, including plans to switch from regional jets to mainline aircraft on flights linking Atlanta with Memphis, Minneapolis and Detroit; to add a third daily Salt Lake City-Detroit flight; and to launch of new daily service between SLC-Memphis and JFK-Memphis. What’s more, “Effective January 5, 2009, customers can take advantage of full Delta-Northwest code-share reciprocity on flights between Delta hubs, creating thousands of additional connecting opportunities,” Delta said. The company noted that it should have a consolidated worldwide Delta/Northwest flight schedule in place by next summer.

Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper is reporting that Delta will be making some changes at its Cincinnati hub, where it currently operates more than 300 flights a day. The newspaper interviewed Delta executive VP Glen Hauenstein, who’s in charge of merging the Delta and Northwest networks. He reportedly told the newspaper that Delta will cut about 40 flights a day from its CVG schedule in January, a change that he said would allow Delta to reaffirm “its commitment to the Cincinnati hub through the summer season of next year – and then we’ll take another barometer reading of how the economy is doing.”