Delta adds 2 daily nonstop flights from RDU to Nashville

Delta Air Lines’ footprint at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport will continue to grow as the airline kicks off several new flights this year, including two nonstop daily trips to Nashville.

The two daily round-trip flights from RDU to Nashville International Airport will begin on June 12 on a 76-seat jet with two-class service, according to RDU.

“We are really excited,” RDU spokesman Andrew Sawyer said. “It gives our customers more options to Nashville, which is a popular city from here.”

Nearly 250 passengers travel from Raleigh to Nashville each day on one of three nonstop daily flights offered by Southwest Airlines, which is the only airline with service to Nashville. This does not include passengers that fly to Music City to catch a connecting flight.

Delta’s announcement comes after a busy year for the airline, which kicked off four new daily nonstop flights from RDU in 2016 to Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C., Newark, N.J. and Paris. This summer, the Paris nonstop will be upgraded to a larger aircraft because of increased demand.

Delta also is expected to launch a few more nonstop flights later this year, to Austin, Texas, in March and Seattle in June.

Delta spokesman Anthony Black said one of the major factors behind the new additions is RDU’s passenger growth. He said the market that the airport serves is one of the fastest growing of its size.

“The Triangle has a very attractive market, and it has been growing consistently over the past several years,” he said.

Last year, RDU broke its record for most customers when a little more than 11 million people traveled through the airport – 10.4 percent more than in 2015. This topped the airport’s previous record, set in 2000, of 10.4 million passengers.

About 30 percent of the passengers that boarded a plane at RDU in 2016 flew with Delta, which will offer as many as 74 departures a day to 26 weekly destinations as of this summer.

“Raleigh-Durham customers have benefited from Delta’s continued expansion with seat growth of over 60 percent since 2010, and we look forward to adding this additional nonstop option for our customers,” Joe Esposito, Delta’s vice president of network planning, said in a statement.

This announcement also comes less than a week after Southwest Airlines announced two-day nonstop service to New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which will begin on April 30. RDU’s first nonstop service to New Orleans will start Feb. 16 via Allegiant Air.

This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 3:37 PM with the headline "Delta adds 2 daily nonstop flights from RDU to Nashville."