Quote: "BA and Virgin do not wish to dilute there service from the UK, why would they. In the past they forced everybody into London either by car from Birmingham or Shuttle from Manchester, NI, Scotland etc.
Certainly at Manchester they have have come badly unstuck, as I understand it QR, EK , Eithad are all full so they are losing a massive amounts of traffic.
Not sure about BHX because it does tend to suffer by the location of Heathrow and Manchester but certainly in the NWest there us clearly lots of money to be made...... "
Classic hub-and-spoke policy as adopted by almost all non-"no frills" carriers. So one would expect foreign carriers to be doing longhaul at BHX, feeding their hubs, for onward journeys. For example if HKG or BKK were viable, expect CX or TG to be on the route, rather than BA or VS.
People don't mind going the "long way round" to save a little money, so EK does very well out of UK regional airports.
Before hub-and-spoke became more or less mandatory, BA had a secondary hub at BHX. Regretably it is no longer tenable.
However, BA and VS are not the only UK airlines. If there's money to be made, airlines will be there, UK or overseas.
After all, let's face it, there are no capacity problems at BHX, and the authorities there would (rightly) welcome any potential longhaul carriers with open arms!
Quote:"Not sure about BHX because it does tend to suffer by the location of Heathrow and Manchester but certainly in the NWest there us clearly lots of money to be made......"
Not necessarily the case, if there's sufficient demand and profits to be made, such proximity is not an issue. Look at the proximity of PHL, IAD, BWI and the NYC airports, for example, or DUB and SNN.
Quote: "If Air India were happy with their position at BHX, if they were forced to move to LHR for the winter they would have done everything in their power to return the next summer. It was just to protect their 'valuable slots' at the airport - though I wonder how that thought only came about in 2008, three years after they started serving BHX."
It's nothing to do with BHX specifically, AI have been in financial dire straits for ages, so it could be that the 'valuable slots' at LHR have been sold off or leased out longterm.
At LHR, they used do several daily flights to/from Bombay, with one extended to New York, plus a daily to/from Delhi, and at one time, even direct to Calcutta. Now it's just one flight/day each to/from BOM and DEL!
It's not just BHX, AI has withdrawn from most of Europe, most of Africa and the Mideast, all of Australia, and much of Asia. Only the Gulf appears to be a growth area for them. That once great airline is a shadow of its former self.
Last edited by Fairdealfrank; 16th Jan 2013 at 17:36.