MINNEAPOLIS — Northwest Airlines' daily Amsterdam-to-Bombay run fetches $1,400 a ticket, the airplane flies nearly full, and JetBlue doesn't go there.

Which is why international flying is a moneymaker for most U.S. carriers — and why Northwest and Delta Air Lines Inc. are both making international flying a big part of their bankruptcy makeovers.

Delta says it will increase international flying by 25 percent while cutting domestic flying as much as 20 percent, and this week it announced new nonstop service from Atlanta to Tel Aviv, Israel, beginning in March. Northwest increased international capacity 5.1 percent last month while domestic capacity stayed flat, and it says it will cut domestic capacity at least 10 percent. It's also adding nonstop service from Amsterdam to Bangalore, India.

In Northwest Airlines Corp.'s bankruptcy filing, Chief Financial Officer Neal Cohen went so far as to call the carrier's Pacific routes one of its "most valuable assets," adding, "I believe that (Northwest's) viability as a going concern is dependent upon the maintenance of these foreign operations."

Northwest and Delta are following the lead of UAL Corp.'s United Airlines. Before bankruptcy, United got a third of its passenger revenue from overseas flying. Now it's half.

Overseas routes "are the brightest spot for the U.S. airlines at the moment," said Morgan Stanley airline analyst Douglas Runte. "International has been the place for (legacy) U.S. carriers to hide from low-cost competition."

Adding flights to Europe is easiest because of relatively relaxed rules about who can fly there. Not so in much of Asia.

Agreements between the U.S. and China limit the number of flights there. Northwest and United are the only U.S. carriers with the right to pick up passengers in Japan for flights further into Asia, a huge advantage over other U.S. carriers trying to do business in that booming region.

"Low-cost carriers are reluctant to jump into the international arena. It requires long planning horizons, sometimes years of diplomacy," said Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation expert and economics professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

He also said the international routes require larger planes than most discounters fly.

Relatively small 737s are "a dime a dozen, long-range 767s are not," Schwieterman said.

Carriers will soon have more opportunity to fly to China. An aviation agreement with the U.S. signed in July 2004 will increase weekly flights between those two countries from 54 to 249 over six years. Under the agreement, AMR Corp.'s American Airlines won permission to fly from Chicago to Shanghai beginning April 3, 2006. It's also adding a nonstop Chicago-to-New Delhi flight Nov. 15.

American, which has historically had a large Latin American network, has increased its international capacity 9.5 percent this year, including a 29 percent jump in flying across the Pacific. Domestic capacity is down 1.8 percent.

Rising fuel prices play havoc with the profitability of those routes, though. Even as Northwest adds its new flight to Bangalore, it recently cut its New York-Tokyo nonstop, blaming fuel prices. American is dropping its flight between Chicago and Nagoya, Japan, for the same reason.