You may well be right, but ME carriers don't fly to LHR non stop. This thread is about flying non stop to and from LHR.

We're talking about a twice-daily service LHR-PER here.

But aren't there direct flights between London and Glasgow?

Fly Glasgow to Dubai and Dubai to Sydney on Emirates breaking the journey into two manageable legs instead.

Quite so. And a motorway all the way, too, come to that. :O

A dubious generalisation based on dodgy maths and accompanied by an invalid analogy.

Say around 2.8 million people in W A - probably enough to fill Cleared Visuals couple of direct flights a week, maybe more

N E England has supported a daily Emirates flight for over 9 years and they have a slightly smaller population (~ 2.5 million?) and not much in the way of high disposable income.

It'll never be a major money spinner but it could work at low frequencies - certainly no way it could do 2 flights a day

Hardly a realistic comparison. NCL has such a small proportion of connecting traffic that I don't think they bother recording it.

But nobody is seriously suggesting LHR-PER would be viable with only O&D traffic.

Well I was counting the whole of Western Australia in the 2.8mm - as others have pointed out they don't see much inter-State connections traffic being made buto get to the 2.8 you'll have to have inter-WA connections for sure

You could probably fit the highly populated bit of NE England into Greater Perth TBH

The UK city of Newcastle couldn't support a direct long haul flight to any single destination, Emirates can make it pay because of their network of connections through Dubai.

Freight will make more money for EK. Not sure if it can be carried on the PER-LHR-PER route though.

An ULH sector requires many kgs of fuel to carry each kg of payload. Other than a few kgs of urgent next day delivery envelopes, that will cost a fortune, I doubt if QF would carry non-priority cargo on a route like this.

"The UK city of Newcastle couldn't support a direct long haul flight to any single destination, Emirates can make it pay because of their network of connections through Dubai."

Last time I went through Dubai from Paris I reckon about 30% of the pax headed to the connections area.......................

Dubai is a popular stop over city and Emirates offer many packages for a couple of nights accommodation and various tours.

The demographics are quite different between Newcastle and Paris, well healed Parisians may have a short holiday in Dubai to get away from the winter cold and do some duty free shopping.

Geordies are more likely to fly Ryanair to Alicante, Ibiza or some cheap booze Eastern European city where they can head straight to the nearest English pub and get hammered on Newcastle brown ale or cheap lager.

Well you can't blame them, if they are getting over a recent illness or operation. :O

I'd guess that pax from Newcastle are a mix - holidays in Dubai - it's only 6 hours after all and the NE Coast gets desperate in winter - and connecting traffic

If you're going long haul you have a choice of NCL-LHR-XXX or NCL-Dubai-XXX -

I know which one I'd take..................

KLM have good connections from regional U.K. cities through Amsterdam and are worth looking at as an alternative to LHR.

Wasn't this thread supposed to be about direct services between UK and Oz?

We exhausted the possibilities of that debate several weeks ago. :O

Go onto the Ozzie pages and they're still keeping it alive - just!

Then how about we talk about how Crystal Palace are doing in the Premier League which has about as much to do as the rest of the cr@p being uttered here?