Skipness is right - Gatwick has always been second to Heathrow, if it wasn't for Bermuda II agreement forcing these US carriers to operate from Gatwick they would have been at Heathrow many years ago, subject to slot availability of course. Open Skies has changed all that. BAA in agreement with other stakeholders agree runway and terminal capacity but doesn't have much say as to which airlines are allocated slots. I would have thought that at Heathrow they don't need to do much marketing to attract new airlines as virtually all the runway slots are spoken for and the airlines themselves do slot trading. Other BAA airports may be different. As long as the runway and terminal capacity limits are not exceeded then that's fine. Gatwick is reverting back to what it always was, a major base for the mainstream charter operators plus a good variety of scheduled holiday long/short haul flights with the occasional big non-Heathrow scheduled airline. It also seems to attract ex Stansted operators like Norwegian and Iceland Express so clearly it is the no 1 choice for some operators who for one reason or another start a Stansted route only to transfer it later to Gatwick. I wonder if Air Asia X has Gatwick in it's sights once the start up deal at Stansted has expired.