
Hello and welcome to our Monday Briefing for the week beginning 3 September 2018, summarising the main developments in air travel over the past week, and a look to the week ahead.
London City
London City airport was once one of London’s better kept secrets.
It wasn’t the most accessible but, whilst passengers grappled with long security queues at a Heathrow once heavily prone to disruption, those in the know headed East for a much less stressful experience.
Its aficionados wanted the airport to stay that way. But, just like an up-and-coming neighbourhood on the cusp of gentrification, the big boys soon moved in.
BA CityFlyer has gone from almost next to nothing in ten years to by far the most dominant airline at the airport. With a degree of autonomy from its parent, it has been aided by a fleet of shiny new Embraers and a very strong frequent flyer base in the airport’s catchment.
BA has confirmed it is had to add four Embraer E190s to its fleet in 2019 – though from whom it is not known. It has already announced a new route to Rome and is expected to add more next year. The Embraer aircraft are one of the few reliable pleasures in short-haul travel in Europe. To cut a long story short, for industrial relations reasons, the seating capacity of these aircraft is capped at less than 100 seats. So they have been spared the “densification” that has befallen their larger Airbus cousins at Gatwick and Heathrow.
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