Looks as if there are going to be 2 a319s and one 320 this summer in Belfast. The lgw route seems to be back to a 319. Odd I thought summer would have been busy for them.

Oddly enough I had a feeling both LON routes would be on A319's over summer. Be good if EI did launch something new from BHD, I did read somewhere previously they were intending to open up a new route from BHD roughly one a year, also that they wanted to increase frequency particularly to LHR.

Apart from reducing the aircraft size on the Gatwick route from 320 to 319, the booking engine now has departure of the 1st flight of the day at 0740 (same as LHR) arriving in LGW at 0905. It would appear that Aer Lingus is handing the morning business traveller business to BA and the Flybe. The latter on LCY would appear to be having an impact on Aer Lingus route to LGW already...

Rumours of the A320 at BHD moving to DUB

AerRyan,

You mean that there would be 3 x 319's?

My understanding is that the current 320 will stay to serve sun routes and an additional 319 coming up from Dublin in place of the usual 320 that comes.

I can see that there are quite a few routes ex Dublin that would be better served with 319 than sun routes ex BHD. SNN has one. So that makes 4....

Hence, I doubt 3 x 319's....

EI-BUD

I should have clarified, for summer season 2016 the A320 will be moved to pattern and sun routes operated on a W pattern. Not a 3rd A319 but in fact only 2 aircraft.

EI-BUD

In fact EI's LGW and LHR flights are scheduled in like a near mirror image of each other - I don't quite catch the logic but I'm sure there's some in there somewhere.

Yes Mart901, I saw that re the timings. It is all a little ironic, given that Aer Lingus moved to the City Airport to chase a business traveller offering, and now there is no service arriving into the London area before 9am. Hence, no passenger can expect to be in London pre 10a.m. on business.


Flybe early to LCY and BA 0655 can each look forward to accommodating the business traveller. Disappointing.


Comments re Aer Lingus doing W rotations with Dublin aircraft makes little sense to me. Firstly, is the plan to cut back on the crew numbers at BHD? Secondly, there will be a huge amount of ferrying crew between bases and finally, the fact that under union arrangements, staff on Belfast contracts are not permitted to work on flights ex Dublin Airport. How does any of this make for operational sense?


Unless they are planning to add additional routes to Europe over and above the existing services flown by the based 320????

Strange, time will tell. It might be that they want more utilization of aircraft, it would enable night flights ex Dub.

AMS loaded for winter, daily, at a later departure time.

No tues or sat ams flights. What's the point in later flights. Surely earlier would have been better to allow for better connections.

Sorry I didn't look properly through to see its 5 weekly. Earlier would be better but depends on aircraft availability, also plenty of later connections across Europe. I'm grateful its keeping going, hopefully it will build up nicely across the year.

KLM concentrates its movements at Schiphol in seven banks / waves of 90 minutes each. All except the first and last are a mix of long-haul and European movements.

So long as the Belfast City flight can align to a bank then it should be useful.

Winter schedule isn't completed yet so watch this space ;)

AMS
 

I still think we will see a night stopping klm yet over winter

Third aircraft for Aer Lingus joining the other two aircraft for the summer.

EI-EPU A319 joins EI-EPR A319 and EI-DEN A320.

I noticed vueling at bhd today, thought that didn't start till May?

Vueling from Barcelona started on Thursday past.

By May they might have had enough practice to even be on time!

This was advertised as a May start when it was first announced. Nothing on bhd website or in press to say it had started. Has it been a catalogue of delays?

From the launch of the schedule there were always two flights in April scheduled. Makes some sense to wait until the route starts on a frequent basis to shout about it...