Given that airlines (BA especially) prefer to consolidate flights at their hubs, how do you propose people from Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, etc, access these BA/bmi routes that would now be at Luton, Stansted or Southend? BA, of course, only fly to LHR, and in some cases LCY and LGW, from these airports. EasyJet or Ryanair may fly from some of these UK airports to the "cheapy" London airports, but you're not going to be able to buy a ticket combining a low cost carrier and BA, and buying two separate tickets would probably cost twice as much and be completely stupid. As such, all these people are just likely to connect through a European hub, such as Amsterdam.Kevo00 wrote:Just last year I went on a newly opened Delta route to Miami from Heathrow. The plane was virtually empty. Maybe it would be better to move routes to destinations like this to other London airports? Perhaps some of the BMI routes that this thread was originally about could be moved to Luton, Stansted or Southend, for instance.
Of course, for Londoners themselves, it may well be OK, but one should not forget about the rest of the UK (which, after all, contains more people than London itself).
Also, BA already operates from three London airports - adding more involves fairly significant costs unless the airports themselves are in some way willing to "assist" BA with a good deal.
I do get what you're meaning here, but at least as long as airlines want to operate hub systems, then you really do have to concentrate on one or two major hubs.