New York: Alliance partners Northwest Airlines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines have announced they will double services and improve connections between the growing North America-India sector this fall.

The expansion of Northwest flights from seven to 14 weekly frequencies and retiming of KLM's services will offer more capacity and convenient one-stop service between North America, Delhi and Mumbai, company officials said.

US-based Northwest, the world's fourth largest airline with more than 2,600 daily flights, currently operates three weekly flights from KLM's Amsterdam hub to Delhi and four weekly flights from Amsterdam to Mumbai. KLM operates from Amsterdam to Delhi on the other four days, of which one flight continues to Calcutta, and to Mumbai on the other three days.

Effective October 29, Northwest said it will operate daily service to both Delhi and Mumbai. The flights will offer a mid-morning connection at Amsterdam from 12 major North American destinations served by Northwest and KLM including Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Toronto, Boston, New York, Newark, Washington, D.C., Houston, Montreal, Seattle and Chicago.

KLM said it will continue to operate four weekly flights to Delhi and three to Mumbai but will retime six of the flights beginning October 29 from a mid-morning to a mid-afternoon departure from Amsterdam. The enhanced schedule, KLM said, will offer new, one-stop connections from major North American markets including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis and Vancouver.

"Northwest and KLM's fall schedule will result in a 50 per cent frequency increase in service between North America and India," Philip Haan, Northwest executive vice president-international, sales and information services, said in a statement. "This is a robust market and we have consistently generated high load factors since Northwest inaugurated service to India in October, 1997."