BA needs to feed its hub. Quite sensibly they have used some of the BMI slots to help them do that more effectively. Leeds route will grow over time. BA must also be of the view that they need to encourage more to use their hub at Heathrow from Leeds than the KLM one at Amsterdam. Nice is a strong route, remember they also serve it up to 3 times a day from Gatwick too.
BA seems to be following the sensible approach of keeping higher yield traffic routing via the main hub. Gatwick is being developed to cover those routes that can fill Club and economy cabins with mainly leisure traffic that prefers to travel BA. Of course business traffic is also carried on some Gatwick routes. Much of this traffic is point to point with some limited feed via BA Domestic flights and Flybe. Destinations that can support services from both airports such as Las Vegas, Barcelona and Nice allow BA to carry more business/transfer traffic on LHR services and keep/improve their share of the leisure market without diluting yield at Heathrow.
Thankfully they now realise that the economy cabin can be
useful to the bottom line especially in these difficult times.
V.
The lack of BA domestic connections flights when compared its European rivals (most of all KLM, thanks to their takeover of Air UK) just shows why we need to expand LHR, why should it chose between:
1: Extensive short-haul connection networks (UK and Europe)
2: Extensive medium/long-hau lnetworks to North America
3: Extensive medium/long-haul networks to Asia/Africa/South America
Lufthansa does not need to make this choice and the same goes to Air France-KLM, until BA fixes this it will fall behind those rivals and that is not good for the UK at all
You also make a good point that you cannot rely on just Premium Class passengers to make your flights sustainable, you need a good mix (but not too much) of Economy (not just O&D, but transfers as well, that’s why KLM is doing rather well, they have got the UK regions covered), hence the reason why airlines such as EOS and Silverjet are not still around