BAeuro

I can’t see Ryanair upping sticks and moving from STN to LGW. They’ve been around years and never shown much interest in LGW, plus they’ve got a nice established base at STN and know what works. Wizz on the other hand, I’m sure they’ll be sniffing around for Norwegian’s slots.

I do think LGW will suffer some heavy losses. Gatwick has always been the next best thing to LHR and handled a lot of the spillover from LHR. Airlines who couldn’t get slots (or couldn’t get more slots) at LHR, chose Gatwick. But now that LHR has room and demand is drastically down, things will change. We’ve already seen Virgin/Cathay/Emirates/Air Malta consolidate their ops at LHR for now, and I’m sure more will follow. easyJet and TUI will remain strong at Gatwick though and BA will be keeping a fair few long haul routes, so not all is lost.

etiene

Because no-one lives outside of the M25 - especially not to the dreaded North!

Bohinjska Bistrica

I don't think that's what was being implied, merely that the OP would consider them but their own location puts them off. I think Ryanair will stay put in any event given they are the dominant carrier. I've no doubt they'll use Covid to squeeze a better deal out STN by threatening to move, right enough.

Wizz has been desperate to get into LGW and has seen its attempts frustrated, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did try to move to LGW. They operate an interesting array of Eastern Europe destinations that are starved of completion, so if the London market or indeed the ex-pats in London prefer LGW to LTN, they might well follow the money.

Worcester

I wonder what would have happened had they been able to take them over?

Cap'n Benj

It will surely allow them to consolidate the planned BOS-STN service to LGW too, not that I ever expected that to operate to STN.

I think there is a future in low cost, p2p long haul, it’s on narrow-bodies though.

TravelNew

Btw JetBlue are proposing business class on their transatlantic flights.

James91

Agreed - it just feels like B6 have far more experience on how to do long-ish flights already. They do South America and some of those flights are at the 5-6 hour mark. This feels like a more logical extension to me, than Norwegian ever did. JetBlue also have a great reputation and brand recognition in the U.S. which is crucial.

AAtticus

Air Antwerp (flying ANR-LCY-ANR in a single Fokker 50) ceases operation.
https://www.ifn.news/posts/air-antwe...es-operations/

Having flown with them on their first day and last week before COVID shut down LCY I'll definitely miss them, it was such a good connection to go back and forth to certain areas in Belgium by avoiding BRU. Friendly staff and great well known pilot as well.

andymcdonnell

Another one to add to the list. Will have an impact on BA & especially EI

Aer Lingus cancels all Stobart Air regional flights
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2021...5-stobart-air/

KARFA

Apparently Aer Lingus had awarded the new franchise for EI regional flights to Emerald Airlines so it was always going away from Stobart. The problem now is Emerald we’re not due to take over until the end of 2022 or start of 2023, so who knows what happens now with those routes.

Quite a substantial loss, and at this rate there will be more this year unfortunately.

noniron

Gutted about this, big blow to BHD especially after the demise of Flybe.

fartoomanyusers

I wonder if Aer Lingus will bring any of those routes into mainline operations until a new franchise partner is up an running - especially when they have so many aircraft sitting around doing nothing ?

Maybe a triangle routing DUB-GLA-EDI-DUB ?!

Cyberhacker

Don't Stobart operate a number of routes for BA - although the article only mentions Aer Lingus routes?

corporate-wage-slave

A ,lot of the Stobart routes for Aer Lingus had BA codeshares. So this turn of events has cut out a number of options for BA ticketing such as NCL-DUB-BOS. Many (maybe all) of these codeshares were standalone, so you didn't need another Aer Lingus flight to make it work.

Cyberhacker

The irony being that the last three press releases have been the announcements of new routes - for Aer Lingus - although these haven't yet started;

• 2021-05-02 New Belfast/Glasgow route (19 weekly!)
• 2021-05-10 New Dublin/Cardiff (3 weekly) and Belfast/Cardiff (4 weekly)
• 2021-04-22 New Dublin/Exeter (4 weekly) and Belfast/Newquay (3 weekly)