United Airlines is adding another transpacific flight from its Los Angeles hub, with new service to Beijing, the Chinese capital, starting next spring.
United Airlines New Beijing Flight From Los Angeles
While most of the world has recovered from the global pandemic, China has not and air service between the United States and Mainland China remains depressed compared to pre-pandemic levels. Recovery was initially restricted by draconian flight controls instituted by the Chinese governments (including a penality-driven suspicion system if passengers arrived with COVID-19) but service has been slow to return even as such restrictions have been lifted. There still remains a flight cap between the USA and China (applied to both Chinese and US carriers), and US carriers remain under that cap.
From its LAX hub, United Airlines has resumed service to Shanghai (PVG) and also launched service to Hong Kong (HKG), a special administrative region of China. After requesting permission to launch another China route last month, United has announced it will launch service between Los Angeles and Beijing (PEK) starting on May 1, 2025. The flight will operate three times per week according to the following schedule:
- UA771 – Los Angeles (LAX) – Beijing (PEK) dep 11:10 pm arr 4:45 am+2
- UA772 – Beijing (PEK) – Los Angeles (LAX) dep 12:00 pm arr 9:35 am
The flight will operate Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays traveling east and Thursdays, Saturdays, and Mondays traveling west and utilize a Boeing 787-9 with:
- 48 seats in Polaris business class
- 21 seats in PremiumPlus premium economy
- 188 seats in economy class, including 39 Economy Plus seats with extra legroom
United also serves Beijing from its San Francisco (SFO) hub.
Air China, a Star Alliance partner, already operates two flights per day between Los Angeles and Beijing. Unlike United, Air China flights have access to Russian airspace, which makes them faster and more efficient than United (though one of Air China’s two daily flights seems to avoid Russian airspace).
Neither Delta Air Lines nor American Airlines serve China from Los Angeles, though Delta plans to re-launch its LAX to PVG service next May.
CONCLUSION
United will launch 3x-weekly service between Los Angeles and Beijing starting on May 1, 2025. The new flight is now bookable and represents an optimistic move considering its reported low load factors on its San Francisco – Beijing flight. The route will be United’s second to China from LAX, augmenting service to Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Will China allow contaminated US airlines now that bird flu is spreading all over the country?
Kind of pointless, but UA has excess wide body capacity at times and needs to put them somewhere. Traffic to/from China is soft at best.
Flight time is horrific
Pretty ideal for sleeping when flying to PEK, right?
Since PEK airport is Air China main hub, UA’s proposed LAX-PEK schedule would allow convenient connection to and from nearly all China’s airports.
Non-stop flight ticket between USA/Canada and China is still 50% more expensive than pre-covid. UA’s SFO-PEK route is likely profitable.
Doesn’t China have a huge cargo market?
I mean it makes sense in a way because UA has hubs with a lot of Chinese population and Air China is apart of the Star alliance
The long-distance Chinese air cargo market is extremely large whether looking at flows to North America, Europe, Africa, and South America.
Consumers like cheap imports.
One Air China is a “legacy” service from when 8 flights per week was allowed. As I understand it one of the conditions of raising the flight cap US-China was that NEW frequencies by Chinese airlines cannot use Russian airspace while the existing 8 couldn’t be easily modified so continue to use it while others like PEK-JFK do not
To be honest, I bet a lot of flyers will prefer UA’s service over Air China.
UA isn’t the most premium airline, but its network is solid, seats are 100% consistent, and ground experience is nice with Polaris. UA is consistently better than almost all Chinese airlines and does serve as an upgrade.
This is horrible aviation policy and while China’s Covid policies were insane, they are now long over and this falls entirely at the feet of the United States and our joke of a Secretary of Transportation which have no business protecting US airlines by dictating the routes foreign carriers take once they leave the boundaries of the United States. This mostly screws not Chinese, but Americans who are paying double the price for flights with half of the frequencies.
I saw one American at CAN a few days ago come out with having been subjected to mandatory throat swabs and a blood pull test in the quarantine control room. “The crime”? The heat sensor gates — which are of questionable reliability at the best of circumstances and can be fooled otherwise — had flagged the traveler as having a fever, and so off to a mandatory quarantine health check. Probably didn’t help to be wearing a ski coat, a hat and racing at the airport, but some people just have elevated temperatures for reasons unrelated to communicable infections.
What are you talking about?
If you fly into or out of China and supposedly trip off the thermal scanners as having a fever, it can lead to a mandatory visit to the quarantine immigration control check where they may well condition your next steps based on mandatory throat swabbings and blood tests for infectious diseases. Most recently hit a SAS promo runner while trying to go through the auto-scan auto-gates at CAN who was catching up with people flying into CAN to catch the KQ flight to BKK. And China does have an infrastructure in place for exit bans. Just something to keep in mind still to this day when China is involved.