“There’s nowhere like London,” a leading airline executive told me. “If you can’t make a route work from London it’s not going to work from anywhere in the UK.”
The British capital is by far the biggest city in western Europe. Not only is the population large – the people are also extremely diverse and relatively wealthy. Ethnic diversity spells potential traffic for the so-called “VFR” (Visiting Friends and Relations) market. Wealth indicates a higher propensity to fly.
Naturally, airlines that are hungry for new business to or from the UK will launch links to a currently unserved location from London before they contemplate a connection from a provincial airport.
As a result, of all the international destinations served by air from Britain, only a tiny handful are not flown from one of the London airports.
Sean Moulton, the aviation schedule analyst who knows more about airline routes than you or I ever will, can count the destinations served from the UK but without a London link on the fingers of one hand.
Want to fly to Cuba? You are a couple of decades too late. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Caribbean’s largest island was ridiculously well connected. Cubana, the national airline, had daily flights from London to Havana plus a weekly service from Manchester. Virgin Atlantic joined the fray with a link from Gatwick. These scheduled flights were supplemented by charters from a range of UK airports to Holguin – serving resorts in the east of the island and Varadero, the main package destination, a short way east of Havana.
By the start of 2024, the options had shrunk to a single charter on Tui from Manchester to Varadero. Anyone hoping to fly direct to Cuba from the UK – and thus avoid the hell of a connection in Paris CDG on Air France or Madrid on Iberia – must head to the northwest England airport. But hurry: the last flight is on 21 April, after which the last bastion of state communism in the West will no longer have a direct flight from the UK.
Next up: the Faroe Islands. When I flew to this Danish Atlantic archipelago, roughly halfway between Scotland and Iceland, the only UK link was from Aberdeen. This has now moved to Edinburgh. But you will need to cross it off your list come summer: for the three months of June, July and August, the Faroes carrier Atlantic Airways will have a twice-weekly…
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