Challenging year ahead for City airlines
This year promises to be a challenging one for the aviation industry – battling a global financial meltdown and reduced passenger numbers.
However, London City Airport’s passenger figures are up and with a flight increase agreed by Newham Council there is scope for expansion.
So what are the plans for airlines at London City for 2009?
British Airways
It is a big year for British Airways which will fly 32-seater business class jets to New York later in 2009.
Due to the Docklands airport’s short runway, flights will stop off at Shannon in Ireland to refuel and passengers will go through US immigration checks there. Return flights will be non-stop.
BA ended 2008 on a sour note when Flightline Ltd, which operated 12 flights a day for BA at City Airport, went into administration in December.
The failure of the Southend-based airline caused a reported 235 redundancies.
BA decided to transfer the operations in-house but had to lose its route to Warsaw in Poland.
On Monday, Sun Air, comes to City Airport, launching a twice daily service to Billund in Denmark as a charter service for British Airways.
Aer Arann
Aer Arann is arriving at London City when it begins routes to the Isle of Man on Monday. It will bring the number of flights to the island in the Irish Sea to four a day.
The service has had just one return flight from VLM since the closure of EuroManx last May.
CityJet and VLM
Air France-KLM, which operates at the Docklands airport through CityJet, bought VLM in October following approval from the Office of Fair Trading.
With VLM, one of the biggest airline’s at City, there have been changes in logistics.
For example, VLM has already taken over CityJet’s Eindhoven flights, as its aircraft has a higher capacity for the popular route.
In exchange VLM has given CityJet its flights to Amsterdam.
Eastern Airways
In order for the Air France-KLM takeover of VLM to be approved, the Office of Fair Trading ordered the airlines to surrender some of the City to Amsterdam flights to Eastern Airways.
The OFT said this will maintain the competitive market.
Eastern, which is based in Norwich, has not revealed a starting date for the flights.
Lufhansa, SAS and Swiss International Air Lines have no plans for new routes at the moment.
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Dear Rob
Yet another piece from you spinning London City Airport. It really is now just becoming boring and unimaginitive.
Every week spin , spin , spin.
I was going to correct the inaccuracies in your piece but whats the point? Did you even write this or did it come direct from the airport. For some reason you really are intent or keeping Richard Gooding in the lifestyle he has become used to.
City Airport is in a densely populated area of London, there are not enough infrastructures to deal with all the passengers coming from the airport, the runway is too short and cannot expand, Crossrail is being built and with the credit crunch people avoid short-haul flights like the plague...
These flights to New York, wich have to stop in Ireland, and take 9 hours instead of six and a half from a proper airport, won't be very successful...
Richard Gooding is deluded.