oneworld Route List: Transpacific


a map of the world with different colored lines

A while back I started compiling collections of long-haul routes flown by carriers in the different alliances. The main goal was to make it a bit easier to handle award search planning as those long-haul routes are often the hardest to figure out. I took a bit of a break – far too long, really, but I’m back now with another installment: oneworld trans-Pacific flights. There are only 32 that I came up with in my first pass (I’m planning ahead for American’s announced 2014 changes in this list) though I’m sure someone will find something I missed and let me know.

a map of the world with different types of flights

Of the 32 routes, I only see ORD/LAX-NRT as duplicates (both are served by AA and JAL). UPDATE: MH also operates NRT-LAX so that’s actually got three carriers. Everything else appears to have just the one airline flying it. Compared to the Star Alliance version of the map this one looks rather anemic, really. JAL and AA are also tied for the most routes with nine each.

Here’s the breakdown on a carrier-by-carrier basis.

Cathay Pacific

a planet with green lines and continents

YVR HKG CX
SFO HKG CX
LAX HKG CX
JFK HKG CX
EWR HKG CX
YYZ HKG CX
ORD HKG CX

American Airlines

a map of the earth

ORD NRT AA
ORD PVG AA
ORD PEK AA
LAX PVG AA
LAX NRT AA
DFW NRT AA
DFW ICN AA
DFW HKG AA
DFW PVG AA

JAL

a planet with white lines and white text

HNL HND JL
SFO HND JL
HNL KIX JL
HNL NGO JL
HNL NRT JL
LAX NRT JL
SAN NRT JL
BOS NRT JL
YVR NRT JL
ORD NRT JL
JFK NRT JL

Qantas

a map of the world with red lines

HNL SYD QF
LAX SYD QF
DFW SYD QF
LAX BNE QF
DFW BNE QF
LAX MEL QF
HNL MEL QF

Malaysia Airlines

a map of the world

LAX NRT MH

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Seth Miller

I'm Seth, also known as the Wandering Aramean. I was bit by the travel bug 30 years ago and there's no sign of a cure. I fly ~200,000 miles annually; these are my stories. You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

24 Comments

    1. The *A link will work in a couple hours, Jane. It was originally scheduled to be posted first but with all the other stuff happening this past week I kelp pushing it off. Oops.

  1. Seth, ever since you published the transatlantic star alliance map, I wanted to have a list in my back pocket, just in case, So, I scripted something myself, but as a reference it would be great to have it published here.
    You seem to have some great scripting tools here so, it would be great to have it updated every months or automatically (or whenever routes are announced/cancelled). Just suggestion on my part…
    Great site and thanks again for the tools…

    1. Yeah, I need to do a better job of keeping the lists up-to-date. I’m trying, sortof. I’m curious what you’re scripting against to get the list. A big part is picking the proper gateway cities to see the routes. It seems to me that a quick manual review is likely to be better and faster than trying to build the rules engine to script but I’m certainly willing to listen to why I’m wrong on that. 😉

      1. I am not saying you are wrong, but when you do something manually you could be missing something….like in the case of MH:LAX-NRT.

        Let’s assume that you have a large comprehensive list of search results of city pairs stored in a table called Results and you also already have the following tables:
        – Airports (with, GPS codes, country/region/continent codes etc.)
        – Airlines
        – Alliances-Partnerships
        – Flights (from your Results table, PDF files or something else…)

        It would take 1 single SQL query to list all flights between two continents from your Flights table and you could also customize your query based on other criteria. Ideally you would process your Results table periodically to update your Flights, Airports and Airlines tables.

        I have done something very similar just for fun.

        1. Sure, I understand how that would work. But that would also mean seeding a rather significant data structure with potential gateways – a manual process where some might be missed – or scanning way more city pairs than are likely to exist. You need that large list of routes to begin with, and it needs to be from a source which is considered reliable and up-to-date. At this point I think that producing it manually is actually more efficient than what the other sources available present as options.

          If you’ve got a source you think is worth looking at I’ll consider it but other than running thousands of queries against a timetable source and parsing them – not a cheap computational process – manual doesn’t seem all that bad.

          1. My estimate is that there are less than 100,000 city pairs with nonstop flights in the world that has alliance/partner implications. I think the list of city pairs/flights table will not change “that much” over time and you can assume that the entries in your table are valid as long as you attach a timestamp to it which is updated every time there is a match from one of your “sources”:

            I assumed that you already have a large existing flights database that you can update automatically based on the searches done on your website. after a while 99% of the search results will consist of flights already on your database. So in a way you can have a self learning flights database.

            I have a table of 9475 airport codes with GPS coordinates and of course checking city pairs one by one did not seem feasible to me. The next best thing, that I can think of is to harvest the information from ongoing searches which will always yield valid city pairs.

            One thing that I was trying to do but I gave up due to lack of time & motivation is to write a parser to extract the flights from the periodically published Oneworld and Star Alliance Pdf files.

            If anyone is interested to collaborate please let me know…

          2. I see what you’re getting at there and I sortof understand the value, but I’m still not sure the data is reliable enough. Yes, I have millions of rows of search results data in my records. But the only carrier showing on NRT-LAX is AA because either JL and MH are never opening up award seats or because the source I’m using cannot see them or something else.

            I don’t think any of the automated data sources are complete enough yet.

  2. Hey Seth!! Nice work!! Please can you guide me to all the alliance wise route maps you have compiled on the world’s major air routes. By the way one intresting factoid. BOM-DXB is one of the world’s busiest international routes not served by any alliance. It has almost 12-13 flights a day with about half of them operated by widebodies.

  3. Missing

    MH KUL-LAX (via NRT)
    QF JFK-SYD (via LAX)
    LA SCL-AKL and SCL-SYD (via AKL)

  4. I assume you’ve excluded trans-pac flights between Asia and Australia/NZ because they do not include North or South America?

    1. They do, and I have that in the list showing as HKG-YVR. I do not show any of the onward 5th freedom flights (nor the QF JFK-LAX tag), just the main ones across the ocean as those are the important ones for award bookings.

  5. GREAT reference too; awesome job!

    I think you should add the through flights, as they can be sold as one segment (useful with RTW tickets as they’re segment-limited) — maybe put them in a dotted line or something similar. This include CX’s JFK-HKG (via YVR) and QF’s JFK-SYD (via LAX), and there’s probably a few more that I don’t know.

    1. P.S. through flights are also useful for award booking as they determine where the North American gateway is located (for a free stopover).

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