Airlines are recovering from their own special form of long Covid painfully slowly: saddled with debt after travel restrictions wrecked their business. So it’s encouraging to see the long-standing game of “weird new air routes you never thought you would see” return.
We already knew there would be a bumper crop this summer, including:
- Manchester to Ohrid, a beautiful lakeside town in North Macedonia
- Copenhagen to Newquay, connecting Cornwall non-stop with Scandinavia
- Belfast International to Beauvais – midway between the Channel coast and Paris, with a landing strip built by the Germans in the Second World War as they prepared to invade Britain
Yet this week a flurry of new surprises emerged – all starting at Heathrow.
Loganair has acquired slots at the UK’s busiest airport, and is using them to serve locations that had abandoned all hope of a Heathrow connection.
City of Derry, in the northwest of Northern Ireland, gets up to three flights a day; Dundee wins a twice-daily link to Heathrow; and, with a stop at the Tayside airport, Orkney and Shetland find themselves with twice-weekly same-plane connections to the world’s most in-demand hub (Heathrow, not Dundee).
The effects are literally far-reaching: Dundee and Derry will be one stop from Australia thanks to the daily Qantas non-stop to Perth, and both cities become much more visible to business travellers and tourists from around the world.
British Airways, which is (I understand) loaning Loganair the slots, will be happy to have new source markets to feed its long-haul flights from Heathrow – though with Loganair using Terminal 2, connections will actually be easier to Star Alliance carriers such as Air Canada, Singapore Airlines and United.
It will be interesting to see what proportion of travellers from northwest Northern Ireland will want to connect, and how many just want to be in London. Heathrow’s popularity among domestic flyers has increased markedly in the past year thanks to the Elizabeth Line. The £20bn east-west line is faster and more comfortable than the Tube, and unlike the (pricey) Heathrow Express it continues beyond Paddington to the West End, the City and Canary Wharf.
Yet is there room for one more new airline at Heathrow? I’m thinking of easyJet. The carrier has long said it will consider a move to Heathrow only if it could operate “at some…
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