Different: This Tiny European Airline Will Begin Airbus A330 Flights To Chicago O'Hare

HiSky will begin flying from Bucharest to Chicago O’Hare next year. It will be the first time since TAROM pulled out in 1995 that the city pair has had nonstop service. It is bound to make my Weekly Routes article (see the most recent edition).

At 4,533 nautical miles (8,395 km) each way, Bucharest will be O’Hare’s third-longest European service next year. Only Istanbul (which is on the European side of the Bosphorus) and Athens will cover more distance. In contrast, Belgrade-Chicago (which Air Serbia relaunched in 2023) and Chicago-Naples (which American started in 2025) will cover marginally less distance.

HiSky To Begin O’Hare Flights

GCMap

Starting on June 4, 2026, HiSky will run twice-weekly aboard the 274-seat Airbus A330-200. It has 24 seats in business (2-2-2, but they’re not fully flat beds) and 250 in economy (2-4-2). It only has one example, which is registered YR-KID. According to ch-aviation, the ex-Sichuan Airlines frame is 15.2 years old. It joined HiSky’s tiny fleet in December 2023.

HiSky’s website shows that the lowest round-trip fare from Chicago in economy is approximately USD$829. This is slightly cheaper than most one-stop flights during the summer. While they will obviously take longer than HiSky’s new nonstop flights, they’ll inevitably have a better hard product.

HiSky’s lowest fare only includes a cabin bag (maximum of 8 kg), online check-in (you pay to check in at the airport), and in-flight entertainment (which is limited or “pretty useless”). There’s no Wi-Fi or charging sockets, and nothing I have seen states that they include ‘free’ food (which means they probably don’t).

Hang On: Bucharest To Chicago?

Flickr

According to booking data for the 12 months to July 2025, Bucharest-O’Hare had 18,000 round-trip local passengers—a small figure. They were primarily Romanian Americans. The Romanian capital was O’Hare’s fifth-largest unserved city in Central and Eastern Europe. Only Prague (32,000), Budapest (30,000), Sofia (29,000), and Vilnius (19,000) had more indirect traffic.

With a low-frequency, summer-only service, and relatively low fares for nonstop flights, it will be easy for HiSky to grow the local market. Additionally, its booking engine shows that passengers can connect to/from Cluj-Napoca and Oradea in Romania, Chișinău in Moldova, and Tel Aviv in Israel.

Proceed further into HiSky’s booking process, and Chișinău, Cluj, Oradea, and Tel Aviv aren’t available. This is probably a technical problem, which will be resolved. After all, they’re available for booking on HiSky’s existing US route. HiSky will probably provide an inexpensive way of reaching Tel Aviv from Chicago. It is currently a market of 48,000 passengers, and one that is currently unserved by nonstop flights. However, United will resume them in November.

It Will Be HiSky’s 2nd US Route

Flickr

HiSky began flying from Bucharest to New York JFK, which is the world’s second-busiest airport for long-haul service, in June 2024. Its launch came 15 years after Delta ended the route. Delta began it in 2007, four years after TAROM ended it.

While HiSky initially operated four times weekly, flights rose to a high of five weekly in summer 2025. Next year, when it begins flying to Chicago, JFK flights will be reduced to three times weekly.

Given that it only has one A330, this is mainly because of limited aircraft availability. Unless it leases more aircraft, which is costly and risky, this also rules out more North American routes (at least during the critical summer). With 26,000 passengers, Toronto is a larger local market than Chicago. In fact, it remains the largest unserved North American city from Romania.