Originally Posted by
LondonElite
I'm sure the whole LHR discussion is a side-track, probably said to see if you would take the bait. No one would seriously want to do that.
I like the theoretical discussion of rerouting an IRROPS domestic pax through INTL to fix a misconnect. I wonder how many keystrokes an agent would need to make that happen. AFAIK an issued ticket that has no international segments (left) cannot have international segments added to it, so they'd have to exchange and reissue everything from scratch, all while eating the additional tax the INTL ticket would incur.
Originally Posted by
jsloan
No, it doesn't. A US carrier is allowed to use any route they want to transfer a passenger between two US points. It would only be illegal cabotage if a foreign carrier did it.
Hmmm. "Any route"? There's actually no freedom for A-B-A with A domestic and B foreign. You could argue it's just the 3rd (A-B) and the 4th (B-A) combined, but afaik one can not freely apply combinability to the rules. Case in point, the 6th freedom (B-A-C) is merely a combination of the 4th and the 3rd freedoms and that needed to be cemented in a separate freedom. So I'm not sure that
under standard ICAO rules, a US carrier could transfer pax on a domestic route through a foreign airport.
However, this is moot for LHR or any EU airport as the ICAO rules are supplemented by the liberal US-EU Open Skies Agreement which allows A-B-A. Similar liberal rules apply to Canada as well.