DALLAS — United Airlines (UA), the world's second-largest airline, has begun daily nonstop flights from Newark Liberty Airport (EWR) to Dubai International Airport (DXB), thus expanding its route network with the help of a partnership with Emirates (EK) announced last September.

The partnership allows UA passengers to fly to more than a hundred destinations via Dubai. In return, EK customers have a route network to 200 US cities via UA's hubs.

The EWR-DXB route has not been operated nonstop since 2016. EK already has a route from Dubai to Newark, but with a stopover in Athens. UA serves this direct 14-hour, 7,000-mile-long route daily with following schedule:

• UA164 Newark to Dubai departing 10:15 PM and arriving at 7:40 PM (+1 day)
• UA163 Dubai to Newark departing 2:15 AM and arriving at 9:05 AM

Unexpected Partnership

The partnership between the airlines came very unexpectedly. Oscar Munoz, former CEO of United Airlines, and other CEOs of major US airlines have criticized the Middle Eastern airlines Qatar Airways (QR), Etihad (EY), and EK several times in the past.

"It isn’t fair to compete with someone who doesn’t have to make a profit and can be subsidized by their governments," Scott Kirby, former president of American Airlines (AA), said in 2015. "Those airlines aren't airlines," said Oscar Munoz in 2017.

The CEOs refer to the fact that the giants of the Middle East receive subsidies from their respective governments, which allowed them to offer superior service at a competitive price on long-haul routes to the US.

In what was once an unthinkable step by a US airline, UA will now sell further connections from Dubai to cities such as Karachi, Pakistan, and Nairobi, Kenya, as part of a new partnership with EK.

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Featured image: United Airlines N78008 Boeing 777-200(ER). Photo: Miles Aronovitz/Airways