USA route
I can't see much hope for a regular scheduled link in the forseeable future though would love to be proved wrong.
Although the loads for much of the summers were pretty good sometimes very good/excellent for the most part, the winter loads were not very good at times.
A local tv reporter confirmed my suspicions this week when he said a Continental source told him that the business/first cabin was one of the problems in that people did not fill it often enough. You would expect business to be the main customers for the front cabin but as Bristol Traveller points out there were still people who were unaware of the route from BRS and continued to use LHR as did others who were aware of the BRS link.
The 'official' reasons given for the discontinuance were the recession, the weak pound and the impending increase in APD.
CO started BRS when it had no access to LHR. When that situation changed I feared for the route and when CO announced some months ago that they were to increase their daily rotations from LHR to EWR from 3 to 5 daily I was convinced the writing was on the wall.
Would it make much sense to operate a route to a regional airport just a hundred miles away from LHR when they had decided to go full tilt from there? Even if the BRS route did make money for CO a concentrated LHR operation would likely make more money pro rata.
Never say never because who can forecast travel and economic trends in the future but I can't think of an airline that would be a fit for BRS at the moment, although I hope the Bristol routes team can.
The loss of the CO route is a blow to the airport's prestige but from a practical point of view I miss the LH Frankfurt more with its worldwide connections and Star Alliance partners as a counter to KLM/AF. Getting that back is more likely than a replacement NYC route in my view.
I was preparing this as B T was posting his input and we seem to be largely singing from the same hymn sheet.
I also agree also with his Ryanair transatlantic assessment.