Now hold on, this isn’t going to happen tomorrow or even next week, but some comments by Mr. Andrew Pyne, Cathay Pacific general manager for international relations, are extremely interesting. It’s a somewhat complicated story, as anything interesting regarding Hong Kong tends to be:

According to an article in The Standard, it seems that Virgin Atlantic wants rights to fly between Hong Kong and Australia. According to Pyne, any such routing available to Virgin would also need to be available to other European carriers, according to European rules. And that would be a big issue for CX, unless CX got something in return.

And here comes the intriguing part. According to The Standard, Pyne said that, if there were negotiations between Britain and Hong Kong with a view to letting Virgin fly from Hong Kong to Australia, then Cathay Pacific would want rights across the North Atlantic from Britain to the US. “Cathay Pacific has been seeking the rights from the UK to the US for a long time,” Pyne said. He said that, while Virgin wanted Hong Kong-Australia rights, “Virgin has been instrumental in blocking open skies between the UK and the US.”

JFK-LHR-HKG has a nice ring to it, don’tcha think?