Originally Posted by
rtah100
I've been wondering about Open Skies and the anomalies of history. I've failed to find the answer from the interweb, but perhaps an FT'er can help with legal or operational flaws in the idea.
What's on my mind is that the EU stretches a lot further than we mostly remember. The UK Crown colonies (or whatever PC name they now have) and French territoires outre mer (also renamed, I think) are not EU members, but all those exciting French departements outre mer are full members: French Guiana in S America, Reunion in the Indian Ocean and Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. Presumably they are entitled to the benefits of Open Skies, i.e. mostly-free operation for any EU airline to the US (the Land of the mostly-free).
If Open Skies permits any EU airline to fly into any US airport and back again, could the sleepy outposts have a new life as hubs?
Air France (but not any other airline unless they had rights to fly from French territory to S American or Caribbean countries) could offer with US-S.America and US-Caribbean routes via a French Guiana hub, for instance. If the aircraft had the range, Air France could offer US connections to Africa and Australia through Guiana as well.
Reunion is less useful as it is not near the huge North American market but instead bang up against Madagascar. There is fast-growing Asia-Africa traffic at the moment, though, so perhaps it could be a future hub between Africa and Asia?
The missing piece to link up the world is a Pacific departement outre mer: they are all outside the EU at the moment, and none of them is very central. Otherwise, Air France could offer connections from the US via e.g. Tahiti, to Australia. The next-best-thing is Clipperton Island, off the west coast of Mexico.
So, would having non-European hubs help operationally? Will we see France and the UK (here is the tenuous BA angle, if an OT thread needs one) rush to incorporate what is left of their empires? Or is this a pipe dream, given BA's retreat from global routes?
Answers on a tropical postcard....
I don't really see any advantage to opening the DOMs or any other geographically non-European EU territory as a major hub. For one thing, connection traffic alone will not support routes, you also need to have some level of O/D traffic. SXM might have quite a bit of that, but CAY and RUN have very little, not least because they have relatively small populations.
Secondly, you have to offer low fares to entice people to choose a connecting flight over a non-stop. If AF (or any other EU airline) had more planes than they knew what to do with, this would certainly be an option for them. However, since most EU airlines actually have a shortage of aircraft at the moment, there are far more financially lucrative projects to be tackled first.
And finally, a word about Clipperton Island. You might want to check out the
Wikipedia article, or just look at a
picture of the island. Is this really your idea of a potential hub?
