Saudi Arabia's brand-new national carrier Riyadh Air has officially announced its first route expansion beyond London with the launch of daily nonstop Boeing 787-9 service between Dhaka's Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport and Riyadh King Khalid International Airport beginning August 1, 2026. The Bangladesh announcement comes just three days after the airline opened public ticket sales for its inaugural London Heathrow service and signals a far more aggressive launch ramp than the carrier originally signaled.
According to filings with Bangladesh's civil aviation authority, Riyadh Air has applied for slots covering seven weekly rotations, with the inbound flight scheduled to arrive at Dhaka at 2:00 pm local time before turning around at 3:00 pm for the return leg to Riyadh. The route will be operated exclusively by the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner in a four-class configuration spanning Business Elite suites, regular Business, Premium Economy and Economy — the same product the carrier is debuting on the Riyadh-London corridor in July.
The choice of Dhaka as the first non-European route is strategically deliberate. Bangladesh is one of the largest sources of expatriate labor to Saudi Arabia, with more than two million Bangladeshi nationals living and working in the kingdom across construction, hospitality and domestic service. The route also captures lucrative religious traffic from Bangladesh's roughly 150 million Muslims travelling for Umrah and, in season, the Hajj pilgrimage. Existing operators including Biman Bangladesh Airlines, Saudia and flydubai have all benefited from the corridor, but Riyadh Air is the first to bring a brand-new full-service four-class widebody product to the market.
For Riyadh Air, the rapid second-route announcement reflects the airline's mandate under Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 to scale quickly. The Public Investment Fund-backed carrier has placed orders for 182 aircraft including Boeing 787s, 777Xs, Airbus A350-1000s and A321neos, with the Saudi government projecting that the airline will contribute $20 billion to non-oil GDP and create more than 200,000 jobs once the fleet is fully deployed. Today's Dhaka filing suggests Riyadh Air is racing to monetize that capacity from day one rather than easing into the market with European trunk routes alone.
The next phase of the carrier's launch will become clearer in the coming weeks as it files for additional slot pairs across South Asia and the Middle East. Both London and Dhaka will be live by mid-August, an unusually fast tempo for a startup flag carrier and one that puts immediate competitive pressure on incumbents including flydubai, Saudia itself and the Gulf big three.
Compiled from publicly available aviation news sources. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. This article is original editorial content; facts have been verified across multiple public sources.
Comments
Loading comments…