Originally Posted by
EI-BUD
It's not about bean counters or whether they got there way. The bean counters don't select these projects. The board would approve something like this. The rationale at the time was that they believed that a select number of routes ex LCY would work, many were mooted including Dubai, Washington, as I understood. So investing in 2 318s was a worthy experiment.
There was a prospect that Odyssey would come in and take some of the highest paying business away. So LCY JFK was an experiment on one hand and a measure to protect their turf. Hindsight is a great thing. Clearly we see now that Odyssey never materialised and who could have forseen covid...
I think that’s a re-invention of the past... the A318 LCY-JFK was a response to the likes of Silverjet, Eos and to a lesser extent Maxjet offering all business class flights to New York from Stansted and Luton. By the time the pair of A318s were delivered in 2009 though, all the above has ceased operations...
I don’t believe there was every any talk of operating other routes apart from among plane spotters. There were only ever 2 aircraft for 2 daily flights, and significant restrictions on number of A318 sized aircraft that LCY could accommodate at the time. The unique aspect of pre-clearance on the tech stop en route to JFK was used to offset the tech stop, it would not have applied to the likes of Dubai, and places like Washington had neither the volume or the financial capital status of NYC to make such routes ever viable.
Odyssey did not announce their launch plans until 2013, when the BA service had already been running for 4 years so there is no possibility that BA were responding to them.