LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

good one!

I am not sure how well CO would do at LHR. VS has it's hype and style. Everyone else has 3 cabins. CO's biggest cards, non-stop to NYC and global and/or USA connections aren't very specail at LHR.

If you aren't getting the F crowd NYC-LHR, then it isn't that great, just look at UA slowly wilt.

I think you're missing part of the point. I am sure CO feels (rightly, IMO) that if they could get LHR authority, they'd get their BF customers who now fly VS onto their own metal more often. They're less interested in the real F customers that BA, UA, and company aim for. A fully paid forward cabin of their own loyal flyers would make CO happy...they don't need a ton of new ones.

EU-US land 'open skies' agreement
 

Taken from the BBC

Could be great news if it is approved!

...but what about LGW?
 

This thought struck me the other day and I was hoping a fellow FT'er could enlighten me. :)

If CO were to somehow acquire LHR authority, slots, gates and necessary support services what would happen to their LGW operation?

PIA has not had a JFK-LHR flight since 1972.

It would be a shame if CO packed up at LGW. LGW is actually very convenient for many people (i.e., me!).

It would have to remain unless they got enough to replace all flights...EWR, IAH, and CLE. That's a fair number of slots, so I'm not sure they could get rid of LGW even if they wanted to. Plus, for some flyers LGW will always be preferable anyway. If nothing else, I'd expect them to keep a once-daily 757 just to keep that station going for the few hundred people who'd want it.

I suspect it could keep up almost the same number of pax as it does now though, with a smaller downgrade than you might expect. I bet CO loses a lot of people to the LHR flights that already operate out of EWR and JFK, and if they got LHR rights they'd pull in a lot of normally-CO flyers who simply skip on the LGW flights. There's so much frequency between EWR/JFK and LHR that it's almost impossible to believe that CO would be purely canibalizing their LGW flights.

I was searching SkyTean.com for some info and came across this article
which clearly mentions the other US SkyTeam partners except CO.

My guess that this is simply a mis-print but could it be forshadowing of things to come?

dan1431

Personally, I'd rather CO flew into Stansted. Lots of connections to European destinations, 45 minutes from terminal to Liverpool Street, beautiful new airport...

Heathrow is a mess.

Certainly Continental appears on the list of airlines serving Terminals 1, 2 and 3 at LHR in the new Transport for London leaflet which indicates at which station you should get off for your flight (issued when the Terminal 4 station reopened last weekend). The codeshare with Virgin would explain that, unless Transport for London knows something we don't...

CO tried this several years ago and couldn't make it work. Methinks that MaxJet wil expend their operations and close this off to any legacy carrier in the future...unless CO can re-establish codeshares and OP partnerships with British LCC's.

I think that -- if CO receives permission to fly to LHR -- thta it won't be enough to satisfy the loads from EWR and IAH. 2x to 3x 777's from IAH per day, plus the ones from EWR are probably a bit too much for the possible open gates at LHR, and since a 757 won't make it IAH to either LHR/LGW, then I think you would see split service from both CO hubs....and maybe also for you folks in CLE if you behave yourselves. ;)

EWR.....many people in the NYC area will fly CO because it leaves out of EWR, not JFK or LGA. These airports are not necessarily interchangeable.

That's the big one. CO also (obviously) has plenty of loyal OP flyers who would now fly VS...some of whom would probably prefer to fly CO metal anyway, though that number is probably small. ;) Really, any flight to LHR will get you pax, espcially when you can support it on the other end with a massive domestic connection matrix like the one CO has out of EWR. That would give them a leg up over other NYC operators of LHR routes.