Heard on fairly good authority that Qatar will re-commence services later this year.

The situation regarding 'will or won't' Qatar be returning to LGW crops up now and again and someone even posted a proposed schedule on this thread last year for LGW to DOH but nothing materialised so unless anything has changed in that respect I suggest that we wait until Qatar officially announces it otherwise your comments regarding the return of Qatar at LGW will be like the numerous other posts that were never substantiated.m

I personally was expecting Qatar to return to LGW but after their recent purchase of extra slots at LHR to accommodate a 7th daily Doha flight I assumed that LGW would have to wait a bit longer until Qatar officially announced a resumption of DOH to LGW.

They prioritised Cardiff. No, I don’t know why either....

Because they already have a London route and if they were able to get more LHR slots why would they need to operate a Gatwick route?

Maybe they will follow Emirates lead and add Stansted... just an idea probably won’t happen but then again who would have thought Emirates would have turn up to the party at Stansted.
Makes sense south of the river and north of the river.

MAG will have very good relations with QTR..

And added too with STN,comprising QTRC albeit for BAWC & the numerous Amiri flights thru the North Side.

Maybe there are some crossed wires here as I've also heard that Qatar will be helping out BA from LGW to utilise the recently acquired Monarch slots.

Haven’t BA already withdrawn their application to deploy Qatar aircraft from the CAA

No crossed wires...

....& yes as has been discussed QTR 320 lease in permission refused by the CAA.

I expect the Welsh Govt are rewarding Qatar well to come in.

I highly doubt it will do well.Even BHX is struggling and even the MAN load factors are not that great.

EU state aid rules wouldn't allow direct subsidies for a route like that.

In that respect you could include Cathay Pacific who seem to be successful at LGW with their single daily HKG flight along with their current LHR flights.

With regards to Emirates and Stansted, it wasn't a huge surprise by any means it was a case of 'not if but when' will Emirates announce Stansted and sure enough it's finally happening but definitely no big surprise that they are now turning up 'at the party'.

I was under the impression that the Qatar Cargo flights operated on behalf of BA World Cargo have moved from Stansted to LHR and the current Stansted operation are actually Qatar Cargo own designated flights.

Yes, QTR have operated a weekly, more recently twice-weekly, A330-200F DOH/LHR service since June of last year, routing via Basel either inbound or outbound.

The Cathay Gatwick service is interesting, indeed they’re actually dropping capacity out of LHR and retiring B77Ws in favour of A359s.

Qatar Cargo moved the A330F flights to LHR incrementally from last Summer starting with the Saturday service.
This is their own freighter operation.

The QTR Cargo B77F service is retained at STN & is indeed operated for & on behalf of BAWC.
Talk that BAWC needed more lift & a possible move to utilise the B748F as well which QTRC are incorporating into their fleet.

Remember that Qatar Holdings LLC hold a significant share in the ownership of Heathrow Airport. Operating out of Gatwick for example, means giving business to effectively a competitor!

So some of the routes that Norwegian was to drop at the end of March will now continue into the summer I believe.

They have been quietly adding routes from April at about 1 a week, TFS,LPA,ACE all now on sale for summer, I think IBZ was only added this week? Not a big lead time, some suggestion that they wanted to ensure they could crew them without recourse to wet lease.

Rumour is the early build 7M8 will go to HEL starting April as new build ‘ norwegian spec’ 7M8 are delivered for US ops, the early ones were intended for South West.