"tim....." wrote:
"Roland Perry" wrote in message ...
In message
, at 14:36:43 on Wed, 3 Sep 2014, Recliner
remarked:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...cus-on-US.html

Interesting, I hadn't seen that.mi suppose it reflects Virgin's change if
ownership, with Singapore's 49% being sold to Delta, which is using Virgin
almost as an offshoot. I imagine it can feed a lot more of its frequent
fliers from the US on to Virgin's transatlantic routes than it could the
routes to Asia and Africa. But it's still sad to see Virgin pulling back
from its world network (having dropped it's hard fought-for Sydney route a
while ago).

Doesn't this simply show that "Virgin" airlines is just Delta (was
Singapore Airlines) with a subsidiary that happens to pay a lot for an
iconic branding. Just like Virgin Media is NTL paying slightly less for the same.

I don't care

But what I do care about is that it helps to prove my prove my point,
that if you have all of the infrastructure required to operate extra
flights to the US, in competition with 6 other airlines, or to obscure
parts of the Far East competing with no-one ...

the extra flights to the US win hands down.

(The fact that the parts of the Far East Virgin have pulled out from
aren't actually obscure, is even more compelling IMV)

I think Virgin lost out to the ME3 on flights to places like Bombay, Cape
Town and Sydney; flights to Delta hubs in the US will be more profitable.
Even BA has pulled all of its Australian routes other than to Sydney, and
Qantas has had to switch its alliance on the Kangaroo route to Emirates.


I hear Recliner's point that there is obviously extra demand from
airlines to fly these flights from LHR and that if they were allowed to
do so the costs of the expansion would be paid for easily.

But what I don't buy, is all is nonsense that the extra runway will help
the general economy by providing frequent flights (and hence
possibilities of new trade) to (/from) dozens of new (new world) locations - cos it wont.

There will be flights to more Asian and maybe South American destinations,
but the first-time new routes take a while to build up large enough loads
to be profitable. Additional flights to the big US hubs can be profitable
much quicker.

For example, BA now has direct flights to Chengdu in China, but I gather
that load factors are lower than the new Austin route. BA probably won't
add additional Chinese cities until Chengdu is in the black. But it
probably wouldn't have added it at all if it hadn't got the bmi slots.