Originally Posted by
BA318
Starlux said they are focused on U.S. market for now but will eventually go to Europe. Although they are very much marketing themselves as a high quality top level airline and seem to have a lot of money so I suspect they would pay for LHR if needed.
I can’t see United at LGW. They have a maintenance base and huge lounge at LHR plus their partners. It would make no sense to add a random once a day to LGW.
AA won’t be back either. BA is still short of frames and I would imagine AA could take over BA routes if needed like the do or use BA’s LHR slots of which they have plenty of slot sitters.
I suspect Etihad will cough up and pay for more LHR slots if they want to increase frequencies just as they have done in the past.
I would guess that further long haul growth will come from India, China possibly Thai, and African carriers.
I'd say we'll have to wait and see.
Many people (myself included) never thought that seeing Singapore Airlines, the best example of of a high-quality, full-service long-haul airline I can think of whose two-letter flight number prefix SQ actually stands for superior quality, at Gatwick other than on a one-off charter or a diversion can be anything other than a pipe dream. And as far as the money to buy the slots needed to increase frequencies at Heathrow is concerned, as one of the most consistently profitable and one of the most highly capitalised airlines of one of the wealthiest and economically most successful nations, Singapore Airlines could surely have found this money to buy these slots off a struggling, effectively slot-sitting airline at Heathrow. Yet they decided to come to Gatwick (possibly recognising the value of the additional connecting passenger and cargo traffic Gatwick can generate in areas outside of the Heathrow catchment, something Emirates already recognised three decades ago as far as Gatwick is concerned and more recently as far as Stansted is concerned as well). So, your comment regarding Starlux as well as Etihad is premature in my opinion.
Regarding the big three US legacy carriers, using your argument as to why United wouldn't ever consider operating an additional daily summer-seasonal service from Gatwick to Newark, pretty much the same could also be said about Delta. They also have all their Skyteam alliance partners at Heathrow, incl. their main transatlantic JV partner Virgin Atlantic, with their Heathrow presence being all-year round dwarfing their single daily summer-seasonal Gatwick-JFK service. Yet they decided to come to Gatwick last summer after a 12-year hiatus, even after JV partner Virgin had ditched Gatwick entirely at the start of the pandemic, and decided to come back again this summer. I don't think Delta only did this because Virgin gave them one of their former four to five daily Gatwick slot pairs, i.e., essentially only to do Virgin a favour so that not all of their former Gatwick slots get passed to other airlines with whom they have no business relationship in the increasingly unlikely event that Virgin decided to return to Gatwick. Also re a potential future seasonal United presence at Gatwick, I know from a presentation Gatwick did last year, which was about the long-haul airlines their route development team is focusing on, United was one of the airlines mentioned on one of the PowerPoint slides I saw (as were Japan Airlines and LatAm b.t.w.). While there was no mention of American, in an interview the head of the Gatwick route development team gave to a media outlet I can't remember at the moment, she said that she was the former head of Philadelphia Airport's route development team and that she wanted to use her contacts with the Philadelphia airline community to attract a daily service from Philadelphia to Gatwick, at least on a seasonal basis. American being the resident hub-and-spoke operator at Philadelphia would be the only realistic candidate to realise this ambition in my opinion.
Last but not least, Gatwick's current management has demonstrably a far better track record than its BAA counterpart in its final decade of the airport's ownership (2000-2009) as far as attracting blue chip airlines to start / resume services from Gatwick is concerned.
So, never say never.