A318???

The morning flights are planned as 320s, I’ll check again in the morning and see what the later flights end up being planned with.

Will be interesting to see what the LHR-LGW Movements site says in a few days about tonight.

Seriously though, to pull out of a route after 50 years says something about the state BA these days. I wonder how much of the stated reasons are ‘smoke and mirrors’ aimed at masking current difficulties within BA’s business ?

Not at all, this route has been in steep decline for many years. The only reason it has survived for the last 2 years is because the flight operated LHR-DTW-IAH, and the IAH leg has been propping it up.

Now that IAH can be run direct from LHR, DTW is very weak. Seeing as the motor industry in Detroit has been in serious decline for some time, and Detroit as a city is definitly not booming, noone is very surprised by this really. Anyone with an aviation interest in DTW has been expecting this for a while.

Difficulties within BA’s business? Aircraft haven’t been this full, or making this much money for many years now. Lots of tough, unpopular decisions have been made recently, but ultimatley these have been for a reason, and continue to improve loads and revenue.

I think this was a BOAC route not a BCAL one, although I’m not much of an aviation historian so don’t quote me on that!

Being an air show i’m sure the height and manoeuvre would have been sanctioned by air traffic authority at the time

It seriously doesn’t look like it to me.

Looks like he got it rather wrong tbh!

There’s about 11 FlyBe Dash Q400s still down at the moment, mainly in Exeter.

Our Captain last night on a rather delayed GLA-MAN sounded very jaded, and was clearly very tired of the whole saga. Lots and lots of scared pax gripping the armrests around me, not helped by rather a bumpy flight!

You certainly don’t see many one legged stewardesses these days ! :rolleyes:

:D:D Well spotted!

I think you are right, and I think if they get it right they’ll really hurt BA and KL in the pocket.

What they need next is ABZ LOS. With connections between the oil cities of IAH, LOS and SVG via ABZ an oil city with good point to point traffic for each of these routes I think they’d really be on to a good thing. ABZ TIP might fit in too.

1L.

I agree entirely. However they haven’t a hope in hell of getting access rights to Nigeria. Even BA can’t get a 2nd daily frequency… 🙁

For the last goodness-knows-how-many years bmi have been talking about expansion, the unfairness of Bermuda 2, and effortless campaigning to get access rights to LHR.

The climbdown seen in recent weeks after open skies becomes more and more of a reality is quite sad. With no disrespect to DUB, this is quite frankly a pathetic use of slots compared to what they should be angling for.

I simply don’t buy the excuses being made about LHR disruption, and assume we’ll see a fair bit of scrabbling around increasing frequencies on various routes that were otherwise for the chop.

Even sadder in actual fact is the exciting expansion with the additional A330s coming online. Extra frequencies on MAN-ORD.

Whoopy-do! Although useful for me personally, and beneficial to MAN, it’s hardly what was expected after all that effort…