Originally Posted by
Ph1l1pncl
Many dates in January and February have the last flights at 16:50 and many with large gaps in the services during the day.
A friend who who works for BA posted on their internal work forum about the reduction in NCL flights and it’s apparently tactical commercial reductions for the flights in the winter along with having to give slots to flybe as part of the remedy from the bmi acquisition and and increase in long haul flying of an extra 13 rotations ( New Durban route, extra JNB rotations, continuation of Seychelles etc.
They haven’t finalised anything for summer 19 yet but they will be reviewing all at risk stations later in the summer before having to submit their slot requests etc. . That doesn’t bode particularly well for Newcastle, especially as they already have announced 4 weekly Pittsburgh which will have to be funded.
Unfortunately i I don’t see anything particularly improving, Newcastle is on the cusp of what is viable flying wise, the airport won’t be able to get another carrier to fly the route, Gatwick didn’t work with Easyjet or Flybe and I can’t see Cityflyer operating to London City either. Could we end up seeing a reduction in the airports passenger numbers? Liverpool have recently announced Widerøe and some Wizzair routes, everything has gone slightly stale again here.
I hope capital improvement wise this winter the airport undertakes work on the pier, it does not leave a good impression and is very dated, and the large adverts on the wall are very tacky.
i completely agree with the additional routes - NCL doesn’t seem to have had much recently regarding many new routers and/or new carriers.
in regards to BA, I don’t think there’s any risk of them dropping the route. It’s quite a piopular route for business travellers and a lot of people do still connect in LHR which is important for BA too as they do aim for quite good load factors. BA’s main call centre is also in Newcastle and it’s an important connection for the business (I’m not suggesting this is the sole reason for keeping a route, but there’s other routes that would go first). I think it’s likely we could be looking at less rotations but as someone else has pointed out this seems to be the route BA are going down throughout other UK regional bases.