Air Data News broke this story through its own reporting. The Avianca Etihad partnership sees an Avianca Boeing 787-8 flying under Etihad Airways flight numbers between Barcelona (BCN) and Abu Dhabi (AUH), after a one-year ACMI wet-lease arrangement entered service on 25 October 2026.
A strategic partnership between Abra Group and Etihad, unveiled at the Farnborough International Airshow in July, has now produced its first tangible outcome in the form of this operation. Avianca sits within Grupo Abra, the Latin American aviation group.
What the ACMI Agreement Covers
Under the deal, Avianca supplies the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance while Etihad sells the service under its own EY flight numbers. That arrangement is standard ACMI practice: the wet-lessor provides everything that moves, the lessee provides the brand and the passengers.
The flights operate as EY111 and EY112, which also carry Avianca codeshare numbers AV2421 and AV2416 respectively. The wet-lease is scheduled to run until 25 October 2027.
The Aircraft: N791AV
The airframe assigned is N791AV, a Boeing 787-8. Readers can look up further details on that registration through our Aircraft Search tool.
The 787-8 arrived in Barcelona from Bogotá on 24 October as Avianca flight AV172, positioning itself the day before the wet-lease began. Boeing 787s form the core of Avianca's long-haul flying, with Bogotá serving as the main hub for routes to Europe and North America. We looked at that hub in depth in our Bogotá Airport Guide.
Two Daily Frequencies Between Barcelona and Abu Dhabi
The wet-lease adds a second daily frequency on the route rather than replacing an existing one. Etihad continues to operate its own Boeing 787-9 on a separate daily service between Barcelona and Abu Dhabi, meaning the two carriers together now provide two flights in each direction every day.
That level of capacity on the Barcelona to Abu Dhabi route reflects the stated aim of the broader partnership: connecting the two groups' networks across Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. Barcelona is a natural junction for those flows, sitting at the intersection of European and Latin American traffic as we noted in our Madrid Barajas Airport Guide covering Europe's bridge to Latin America.
The Avianca Etihad Connection
There is a secondary thread to this story worth highlighting. In 2024, Abra took a stake in Spanish carrier Wamos Air, a carrier that runs Airbus A330 widebodies on wet-lease and charter contracts and has previously supplied aircraft to Etihad, meaning Etihad is an airline that Abra's broader group already knows well from the wet-lease market.
Avianca is also adding Airbus A330-900s to its fleet, which broadens the pool of widebody equipment the group could deploy on future ACMI or charter work.
The Bottom Line
The EY111/112 operation is modest in scale: one aircraft, one route, one year. Its significance lies in what it represents rather than its immediate size. The Farnborough partnership has moved from announcement to scheduled revenue service in roughly three months, and the structure chosen, an ACMI wet-lease with codeshare markings on both sides, keeps the commercial relationship flexible for both parties.
For passengers, the practical result is a second daily widebody option between Barcelona and Abu Dhabi, marketed and ticketed through Etihad's network. Whether the arrangement is extended or expanded after October 2027 will depend on how the year of joint operation performs.
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