On Jan 15, 9:22*pm, "tim....." wrote:
"Roland Perry" wrote in message

...

In message , at 20:18:58 on Thu,
15 Jan 2009, Neil Williams remarked:
International transfer business doesn't provide a lot to the UK
economy.

It "tops up" the long haul flights that wouldn't have been economic to run
otherwise. So the transfer passengers are assisting UK residents ability
to fly almost anywhere in the world daily.

I don't buy this arguement.

Most of the places that business people want to fly to, that are currently
served from LHR, would have have more than enough frequency if they were
supported by the UK demand alone. *I accept that there are one or two places
(like say, Nairobi) that need connecting pax but most don't.

I'm flying to Hyderabad next month on a direct BA flight (the same one
I went on in December). When I went last time, at least 25% of the
passengers I saw were transfer passengers - mostly from the US.

Most places aren't New York...

Claiming that we need 10 flights a day to FRA so that Germans can connect
onto flights to NYC (or Americans in the reverse direction) is a nonsense,
yet because of the way that tickets are sold, I bet quite a few do.

Indeed, and if ~all the transfer pax at LHR were doing FRA-LHR-JFK,
then it'd be pretty much non-beneficial for the rest of us. But the
average transfer journey AFAICT looks a lot more like Vancouver-
Hyderabad than Frankfurt-New York.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org