....Approximately 40% of BA's passengers are transfer passengers and the fact is the terminals were never built for numbers going through.
Indeed.
The official figures for all airlines at Heathrow in 2014, show that transfer passengers account for 36% of the total throughput.
The current Airports Commission gave the rough figure of 25% of flights having 40% or more transfer passengers.
Emirates have a Newcastle - Dubai flight, but in reality Emirates is a nation building tool, they are succeeding in taking over the world.
Emirates is indeed involved in nation building and gaining a dominant position in the global air transport market, but they are also making good money on a lot of their routes from the UK regional airports.
Newcastle have the daily flight, but there's also Glasgow, plus two a day from Birmingham, as well as a daily Dublin flight (I count that because it's also taking business away from LHR).
Emirates biggest UK regional operation though, is at Manchester, where there are two A380 and a third B777-300 flight daily. This is more than they are doing at many large European airports and their business is booming.
All the main London airports have a different profile. Heathrow - business. Gatwick - leisure. Stansted - budget airlines.
That's the usual generalisation, but it's not that simple.
While Heathrow has a higher business travel factor than most, Business passengers only account for 33% of the total. That's not to diminish the importance of the airport as a vital business gateway.
Heathrow passengers are two thirds leisure and visiting friends and relatives.
No doubt if a figure was given for yield, it would be more biased towards business travel.
.....Actually BA were pleased. We could reduce capacity and the number of flights on the route and free up the slots for services elsewhere. We'd love trains from UK cities directly into Heathrow for the same reason, but I guess that's not going to happen.
It's quite apparent, that BA have lost an enormous amount of long-haul and European business to/from the UK regions, which is now routing via Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul etc.
While making more money freeing up slots from short haul A320's etc, to operate more long-haul flights, they have strengthened their competitors and cut themselves off from a large chunk of the UK market.
I don't blame BA for that, they've naturally followed the money; it's a result of the failure to provide more runway capacity at Heathrow, when it was called for two decades ago or more.
Trains from UK cities?
HS2 isn't going to be serving LHR directly (if it's built) and that'll be in the late 2020's at the earliest. Early 2030's for HS2 route extensions. Even if passive provision for a link is built-in, we're looking at 20, 30 or 40 years away.
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Most of the traffic to Paris These days are transfer passengers. Ie. New York-London-Paris. I guess price is a major determinant to fly via Heathrow as there are plenty of direct flights to and from Paris.
An interesting example as amongst the huge number of flights from Paris, are non-stop flights to New York & Newark by BA OpenSkies.
Of course some people will choose to fly anyway and for many businesses west of London air travel is preferable.
IIRC, the bulk of UK originating Eurostar traffic, is from the London area and central London itself.
If a local airport is more convenient, it will generally be quicker and is often cheaper to fly.
But when the Eurostar started, yes it devastated the route, but it was expected.
BA pulled out of the because it's high cost base and competition from budget airlines meant that we just couldn't make any money.
But BA didn't actually "pull out". They simply scaled down their operation on that route from predominantly wide-bodied aircraft to firstly B757 and then A320 sized planes.
Budget airlines have been noticeable by their absence on London-Paris and have had little to no impact in that particular city pairing market.. Until only very recently, there was only a low frequency Luton-Paris EasyJet service (3/4 a day). Other early attempts folded quickly. Only very recently have EasyJet added Gatwick-Paris flights.
Interestingly, despite the city centre-to city centre benefits of Eurostar, London City to Paris flights only started and have grown in number over the last decade; well after Eurostar became established.
A third runway at Heathrow will actually reduce levels of pollution. There will be less stacking of aircraft flying around in circles over London, they can more or less fly straight in. Also, as you know when you fly out of Heathrow you can sometimes spend more time on the ground than in the air whilst you are six or seventh in the queue waiting to take off, all this burns fuel. A third runway would ease this.
All very true, except that "aircraft flying around in circles", i.e. holding while waiting to land, do so not over London, but out at the various holding "stacks" which are situated outside London (approx. around the M25), or when delays are longer aircraft hold out over the Thames estuary, near the Sussex coast, Cotswolds etc.
As regards to economic benefits, I'd never thought about this! I guess long haul due to emerging markets in Asia, particularly China and India. At the moment unless you buy a set of Heathrow slots the only way you can start a new route is by cancelling flights on another route or by cancelling the route altogether or moving it to Gatwick.
Heathrow is definitely missing out on those new destinations in places like China, in complete contrast to airports like Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt. It's not an insignificant opportunity being lost either. This aspect is part of the whole debate.
Heathrow was never designed as a hub airport, obviously. It just grew and frankly it's a mess. It's always been a building site. How bags manage to get from one terminal to another and between different airlines is beyond most of us. A lot do go missing (temporarily), mostly caused by tight connections. Some effort has been made to ease this by locating airline alliances in the same terminals, ie. T3/5 for one world, T2 for Star Alliance and T4 for Skyteam.
I couldn't agree more. The old BAA made a hash of most of the developments, over three decades or more. Thankfully, the mess is finally being sorted out with the redevelopment plans.
Once the T2 extension is completed and T1 & T3 have been demolished, hopefully it will be a far better airport to use and negotiate and far better integrated into the rail services (Crossrail, WRatH, Underground and whatever happens to HEX).
