When I was checking out IAG’s 2025 Annual Report for Tuesday’s Aer Lingus article I noticed an interesting comment on page 8. According to IAG, “Madrid is the new Miami”.

They mean that Madrid is the new hub for Latin America and the Caribbean, noting a 43% increase in the number of Latin American visitors received into Madrid between October 2019 and October 2025.

Madrid is certainly something like Miami for IAG – the large airline group will operate 1,132 flights to Latin America and 206 flights to the Caribbean from the Spanish capital this September.

But is Madrid really the new Miami? I decided to find out and am only partly convinced. Read on to find out why…

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

I took a look at schedule data for the month of September for every flight to and from Miami and every flight to and from Madrid to answer four questions:

Q1. How do Madrid & Miami compare based on standard airline KPIs?

Q2. How do Madrid & Miami compare based on range of destinations?

Q3. Are Madrid & Miami equally competitive to Caribbean & Latin America?

Q4. What is the real reason behind IAG’s statement?

I divided the western hemisphere into three groups – Caribbean, Latin America and North America. For the purposes of this analysis I included Mexico in North America but all other Central American countries in Latin America.

The boundaries are not always precisely defined. As shown in the map below, Bimini in the Bahamas is only 64 miles from Miami classified as Caribbean. Meanwhile Key West, another island with an airport, is 126 miles southwest of Miami and classified as North America.

Generated by the excellent Great Circle Mapper: visit gcmap.com

Used with permission | play with the map here

How do Madrid & Miami compare based on standard airline KPIs?

The table below shows high level statistics from the OAG schedule data. As you would expect, Miami and Madrid have quite different patterns of flights and capacity.

Miami has 8.1 times the flights of Madrid to the Caribbean and 42% more flights to Latin America.

Miami also features many more seats from Madrid to the Caribbean – 4.3 times as many as Madrid. But Madrid actually beats Miami in terms of the number of number of seats to Latin America, with just over 906 thousand versus 818 thousand seats in September 2026.

When it comes to total capacity commitment and capital employed, Latin America and the Caribbean seem much more important for Madrid than Miami. In Available Seat Kilometre terms Madrid will be 16.9% ahead of Miami to the Caribbean this September, and 167% ahead to Latin America.

This is down to geography alone – short-distance flights are better served with small aircraft and shorter stage lengths, leading to more flexibility in terms of number of destinations served and frequency.

Overall Caribbean and Latin America are more important to Madrid than they are to Miami. Only 33.9% of Miami’s ASKs go to or from the two regions, while 41.2% of Madrid’s ASKs do. It is likely that revenue contribution may be proportional.

Both in absolute and relative terms, Caribbean and Latin America are more important to Madrid than they are to Miami. Madrid is not just a “new Miami”. As a gateway to the two regions it has surpassed Miami.

How do Madrid & Miami compare based on range of destinations?

The map below shows all Caribbean and Latin American destinations served from either Madrid or Miami.

The red airports are served from Madrid alone, the blue ones just from Miami and the orange airports from both.

Generated by the excellent Great Circle Mapper: visit gcmap.com

Used with permission | play with the map here

Only seven destinations are Madrid exclusives and all of these are in South America. These represent 315 (9.2%) of Madrid’s 3,410 flights to the region.

Meanwhile 37 Caribbean routes and nine Latin American routes are Miami exclusives. Together these represent 3,022 (37.0%) of 8,157 flights.

So in terms of the range of destinations served, Madrid cannot match Miami.

The comparison is not entirely fair. Small airports like Bimini are never going to be served by capital intensive twin-aisle planes from Europe, in the same way that large planes are unlikely to fly into second- and third-tier European cities from Miami.

Are Madrid & Miami equally competitive to Caribbean & Latin America?

Madrid and Miami seem structurally different in terms of the airlines which serve Caribbean and Latin America. 18 airlines serve the two regions from Madrid, but 29 carriers fly from Miami.

However that does not mean Miami is more competitve than Madrid.

The most committed airline to the two regions from Madrid is Iberia with 55.0% more flights than the second most committed – Air Europa. Iberia has roughly 39% of the flights, seats and capacity.

Meanwhile in Miami American Airlines is the largest airline with 10.5 times as many flights and 12.2 times as many seats as the second largest, Envoy Air, who operate many flights under the AA-associated American Eagle brand.

Together AA and Envoy have 65.3% of flights, 61.7% of seats and 52.4% of ASKs.

The Herfindahl Index of market concentration gives Madrid a score of roughly 23% for flights, seats and ASKs. Meanwhile Miami’s scores are 43.5% concentration of flights, 39.0% concentration of seats and 29.7% concentration of ASKs.

Miami is much less competitive than Madrid.

What is the real reason behind IAG’s statement?

Read more

Airline revenue managers do not talk about margin much. Since costs are fixed in the short term, maximising gross revenue is the key to profitability. The same is not true in other industries, where margin optimisation is important.

I have personal experience grappling with this distinction.

When my business participated in an accelerator in 2017, many others in the programme with me sold to supermarkets. For them and the supermarket buyers, margin not revenue was the first thing they calculated.

More recently as a non-exec of a London-based bar and dining room I spend time engaging with margin data on food, drink and other consumables.

It is interesting to have the opportunity to think about margin rather than pure revenue. The two disciplines overlap to some extent. An airline filling a flight with low-yield passengers is comparable to a bar selling pints of beer at close to cost.

So recent news about how IAG are down-gauging their Aer Lingus operations due to margin rather than revenue or profitability sparked my interest.

Advertisement:

In this article I will explore IAG’s approach to margin and what this may mean for the future of Aer Lingus’s fleet. I will then explain why I agree with IAG’s view that Aer Lingus can achieve higher margins. Finally, I will take a look at the role Loyalty may have had in shaping IAG’s decision.

IAG’s approach to margin

IAG CEO Luis Gallego wrote in his group’s 2025 Annual Report:

“We continue to execute on our transformation which is delivering market-leading margins at Group and at individual operating company level. Group margins of 15.1% are now at the top of our through-the-cycle range whilst Iberia delivered a 16.2% margin, an excellent performance, with British Airways not far behind at 15.2%. Our margins, as in previous years, continue to be significantly better than those of our global competitors.”

IAG has three medium term profitability targets, of which operating margin is one. These are:

1. 12% to 15% operating margin

2. 13% to 16% Return on Invested Capital

3. Under 1.8x net leverage.

Are Lingus achieved 11.1% margin in 2025. This was a 2.5% improvement on 2024. For comparison Barcelona-based Vueling, another IAG airline, achieved 12.0%.

Margin seems particularly important to IAG on their North Atlantic and Latin American routes, which represent 46.7% of all capacity and 70.4% of long-distance capacity across the group. The 2025 Annual Report says:

In the North Atlantic, IAG is driving returns and margins principally through the rebuilding of British Airways’ premium capacity to pre-COVID levels and through Iberia and Aer Lingus’s new A321XLR aircraft, which are already exceeding expectations from both a customer and financial standpoint. In the Latin American market, Iberia’s earnings growth is being accelerated by its fleet of A350 and now A321XLR aircraft.

It is interesting to bear this in mind when looking at the routes which Aer Lingus is suspending.

Minneapolis is currently operated by the Airbus A321XLR – presumably this aircraft will be deployed somewhere more profitable either on Aer Lingus or Iberia.

Denver and Las Vegas are currently operated by an A330, as is Seattle which will become a summer-only service. The Annual Report remarks that the 21 A330-900 aircraft which IAG ordered in 2025 “can be deployed within Aer Lingus, Iberia or LEVEL”.

The Annual Report says little about the current A330-200 and -300s operated by Iberia and Aer Lingus. But it is likely that the principle of using aircraft across brands can be extended to these older planes.

Presumably the aircraft freed up by suspending Denver and Las Vegas, and Seattle in the winter, will be used to increase higher margin frequencies with Iberia in Latin America.

Aer Lingus’s loss will be IAG’s gain

One objection to Aer Lingus’s schedule cuts, which also lead to job losses, is that the flights being suspended are profitable.

Their 11.1% margin on €2,529 million produced €282 million operating profit in 2025.

Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Suppose revenue reduces by 10% to €2,276 million and margin increases to 12% in line with Vueling. Operating profit would be €273 million, which is less than current.

Some might argue that since Aer Lingus will earn less profit than before the cuts are wrong. This is incorrect from IAG’s point of view. By deploying aircraft on more profitable routes they will expect profits at their other brands to increase by more than Aer Lingus’s go down.

IAG says that “all our airlines are capable of margins that are world-leading” and I agree. Aer Lingus probably does have capability to achieve BA or Iberia-level margins.

Ireland’s 7.2 million population is relatively small, at roughly 10% of the United Kingdom’s and 14% of Spain’s. But it is nominal GDP per capita which drives demand for air travel and Ireland’s is high. This is why Qatar (population three million) and Singapore (population six million) can both support large airlines.

World Bank data shows Ireland’s nominal GDP per capita at $107k in 2024, against $52.6k in the United Kingdom and $35.3k in Spain. Ireland as a whole even beats BA’s lucrative London hub, where GDP per capita is between $90k and $95k.

Aer Lingus is also exposed to high income markets in the United States. In their markets, incomes are likely to be closer to Ireland’s GDP per capita than the US average of $85.8k.

By trimming a few routes and focusing on those currently working well, Aer Lingus could emerge an even more successful airline.

Margin and Loyalty

It may be no co-incidence that the IAG co-brand credit card in Ireland is relatively weak compared to BA and Iberia alternatives.

Read more

Mastering relations with the media is a key skill for airline CEOs and Anko van der Werff is no exception. Industry commentary about his upcoming move from SAS to Air Canada is as gushing as you would expect.

Things were not always so. Reading the 20 year old FlyerTalk thread “Anko van der Werff needs to get a new job” is an entertaining reminder that today’s respected airline CEOs were once junior managers learning their trade.

With his move to Air Canada, Mr van der Werff is unlikely to make such gaffes again. Running an airline can often follow a standard playbook. The airline is long established, already highly optimised and has its fair share of legacy issues.

After taking safety and operational reliability as his first priorities, Mr van der Werff will likely have a go at shuffling organisational design and ownership structures. He will probably whip out his spreadsheet and try to find a few more cost savings.

On the revenue side, he may build on his experience integrating SAS with Air France-KLM and Skyteam to develop Air Canada’s relationship with Greater Lufty and United. If he can integrate Aeroplan Loyalty with Revenue Management I would be impressed.

But there is one interesting and unique opportunity for Air Canada where Mr van der Werff has a genuine opportunity to do something new. This is in the Province of Alberta.

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Alberta is enjoying an economic boom. Just over five million people live there according to the latest estimates from statcan.gc.ca. But nominal GDP per capita is close to USD 100,000, so the average Albertan is likely doing well enough to buy plane tickets and, if they so desire, fly longhaul.

Air Canada’s rival WestJet is well established in the province. Their Boeing 787 fleet operates from Calgary to a wide range of international destinations in both eastern and western hemispheres, including Rome, London, Seoul and Sydney. Together with Lufthansa Technik, WestJet has invested USD 120 million in a maintenance facility at Calgary.

The Alberta opportunity for Air Canada in Alberta is not one of competing more with WestJet to steal market share, as that would just lead to value destruction through a price war. Besides, Air Canada already do compete to a limited extent. A Calgary to London service operates. Connections are good in both directions to international flights via Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

The three maps below show Air Canada’s longhaul network, with the Calgary, Alberta service to London highlighted in blue.

Mape generated by the Great Circle Mapper: visit gcmap.com

Used with permission | Links to maps: map 1, map 2, map 3

But for Alberta’s “other” two Air Canada airports Fort McMurray and Grand Prairie the picture is different. These small cities each have only 60-70,000 residents and are served by 48 Air Canada flights a week between them. They both also have an oil and gas industry, traditionally a consumer of air travel.

Fort McMurray has a three times a week service to Toronto and everything else is to Calgary. At Grand Prairie, all services are to Calgary. It would be interesting to see Mr van der Werff launch a few more flights a week from Alberta’s tier two cities into Vancouver and Toronto.

But traditional airline economics alone are not why Air Canada might be most interested in supporting Alberta. The province also has a separatist movement, with some citizens keen on seceding from Canada to become independent or join the United States.

Read more

Last week we looked at how easyJet is essential transport infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Everyone’s favourite orange airline operates 1,208 domestic flights within Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Today I wanted to extend that analysis in two ways. First to evaluate easyJet’s contribution to international routes from and to the UK. And also to understand the extent to which Ryanair and Jet2.com compete with easyJet. Ryanair includes both their Irish and British operations.

I believe that there is a case for the government to step in and only permit a takeover if easyJet will not be broken up. The airline provides services that are unlikely to be replaced by other carriers and the UK’s regional economies depend on the airline.

Once again we will be looking at data from the first week of the next half term holiday – 17-Oct to 23-Oct-2026.

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Competition within the UK

When it comes to easyJet’s UK routes, they genuinely fill a gap in the market. Of the airline’s 1,208 domestic flights, only 212 compete with Ryanair. 142 (67.0%) of these are on Belfast. Another 70 connect Glasgow and Edinburgh with London Stansted.

easyJet and Jet2.com do not compete on UK domestic routes.

Routes shared between easyJet and Ryanair are shown in the map below with green lines. The map also shows Ryanair exclusive routes in blue – these are smaller scale operations with only 30 flights a week between them.

Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper: visit gcmap.com

Play with the map here | Used with permission

International market competition at the airport level

24 airports are served internationally by one of our three airlines. At 12 of these, all three airlines operate. A summary is shown in the table below.

Source: OAG Schedules Analyser, Oliver Ranson’s analysis

This matters because while airlines tend to measure competition at the route level, consumers buy travel from their local airport.

For example a passenger from Newcastle who wants to go to a Mediterranean island can choose Malta or Majorca on any one of the three airlines in our study. Meanwhile easyJet does not go to Ibiza and Ryanair does not go to Rhodes.

Arguably these destinations are interchangeable for many consumers. They all have beaches. They all have scenery, villas and wine. Airlines compete across destinations as well as within routes.

So the three airlines are likely to compete with each other a great deal at many of the airports. The exceptions will be Cardiff, Exeter, Teesside, Newquay and Norwich (Ryanair only) and Southampton (easyJet only). This does not mean those airlines are monopoly operators as the airports are served by non-UK airlines too.

International market competition at the route level

Jet2.com is the airline most exposed to competition from both competitors. Only 19.7% of their 3,066 weekly flights are on markets where they are the only one of the three airlines operating. These represent 295 (32.6%) of 905 origin-destination markets.

For easyJet and Ryanair the corresponding statistics are much higher – 55.1% and 61.3% respectively.

Here is a map showing the exclusive destinations from Newcastle, my home airport. easyJet exclusives are shown in orange, Jet2.com’s in red and Ryanair’s in blue. 47 (52.8%) out of 89 routes are exclusive to one of these three airlines, not counting airlines based in other countries.

My impression is that Jet2.com is much more focused on holiday markets than the other two, which have a mix of both bucket-and-spade and business routes.

easyJet = orange, Jet2.com = red, Ryanair = blue

Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper: visit gcmap.com

Play with the map here | Used with permission

Newcastle’s international routes shared between our three airlines are shown on the map below. These represent 330 (73.2%) of the airport’s 451 services. Note that the three airlines are much more concentrated in these routes than they are in their exclusive markets.

This is because these routes nicely encapsulate Newcastle’s demand profile: stags and hens on tour, or family beach holidays.

Black = easyJet + Jet2.com, purple = Ryanair + Jet2.com, green = easyJet, Ryanair and Jet2.com

Play with the map here | Used with permission

The UK’s aviation market might be less competitive than you think, which makes easyJet hard to replace

The UK short-haul market is not a simple three-player contest. While easyJet, Ryanair and Jet2.com frequently overlap geographically, they are not competing on identical terms.

Read more

easyJet is under offer. I have no idea whether or not the deal will go through. And I have no idea what the plans of prospective buyers Castlelake might be.

But I do know that easyJet is essential aviation infrastructure for the UK. Whatever happens with Castlelake, the government should ensure that everyone’s favourite orange-themed airline must keep flying for as long as it is profitable to do so.

In this article I will explain why I believe this, with reference to the UK’s domestic travel market. Here, easyJet competes with road and rail as well as other airlines. If things proceed with the deal, I may return to easyJet’s UK to overseas markets and British consumers in a future piece.

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Consider the next half term holiday. My old school will break up on Sat-17-Oct and return on Sun-1-Nov. During the first of these two weeks, easyJet will operate 1,208 flights entirely within the United Kingdom. 212,382 seats will be available for sale, according to the latest OAG schedule data.

The UK is quite a small place, so most of these flights will be between rather than within the UK’s constituent countries, as shown in the maps below.

You can click these links to play with the maps:

England <> England | England <> N Ireland | England <> Scotland | N Ireland <> Scotland

To understand how easyJet is essential for British travellers, a little local geography is required.

Start with Northern Ireland. The alternative to flying is rail or car across to Great Britain’s west coast, then a ferry. Irish sea crossings are slow. So are the east/west trains. easyJet’s quick and efficient flights are an essential link to England and Scotland.

Next, consider the smaller (for easyJet) England to England market, where viable road and rail alternatives exist. England <> England has 5,678 seats a week, a rare example of a large data source producing an output in four consecutive numbers!

easyJet does not need to fly from Newcastle, Manchester, Bristol or Newquay to London because rail alternatives are fast and plentiful. The East Coast Main Line and GWR services to the west use the country’s shiniest and newest trains.

Flows on these parts of the network tend to be London-centric, so when seats are available they are available all the way.

It is no co-incidence that flights head north west or south east. Cross-country trains are slow and well known to travellers as probably the grubbiest on the network.

Cross-country rail is also demand constrained. People travelling from Newcastle to Sheffield compete for seats with travellers from Darlington to Leeds, or York to Cheltenham.

A Newcastle to Bristol traveller on the cross-country line is competing for seats with many shorter flows, which makes seats on the train expensive and sometimes hard to find. This makes easyJet a good option.

Cornish seaside destination Newquay will be popular at the Michaelmas half term, and tourism is important for the local economy. The road alternatives are slow. Rail involves an inconvenient transfer. Once again, flying easyJet is a good option. Without easyJet flights, some hotels, restaurants and attractions might struggle to survive.

The England and Scotland market is different still. With 562 flights and 98,424 seats a week, this is easyJet’s largest UK domestic market. British Airways alternatives are available from Heathrow and London City Airport.

442 (79.2%) of the 562 flights a week are to the lowland cities Edinburgh and Glasgow. Travellers from these cities can reach London by train in only slightly more time than flying*. Trains are abundant and arguably an easier journey as there are no metal detectors, queues or long waits to get seated.

Read more

Captain James Cook and the crew of HMS Endeavour took 612 days to reach Botany Bay from England. Thanks to Airbus, Qantas and everyone else behind Project Sunrise, you will soon be able to make the same journey in a little under a day.

The modern miracle of joining a Boeing 787-9 on British soil and stepping off down-under has been possible since March 2018. Qantas launched the service as a trial before committing to Project Sunrise a few years later.

Thanks to a recent Qantas announcement, we now know that Project Sunrise tickets will be available for sale from February 2027, with flights launching in October 2027, presumably for the Australian summer and Northern summer season.

Flight numbers and departure/arrivals times are currently unknown. I thought it would be interesting to consider the options and make a guess about what they will actually go for in this article.

Advertisement:

Flight paths

The shortest distance from Sydney to London is shown by the blue line on the map below. It passes close to Hong Kong and is unlikely to be possible due to Russian airspace restrictions. The Aussie flag carrier’s current A380 service to London via Singapore is shown in red.

Used with permission. Click here to play with this map on the excellent Great Circle Mapper.

Flights between Australia and the UK via the eastern hemisphere are known colloquially as the Kangaroo Route. The idea is that the aircraft “hops” from one airport to another.

Back in the day there were stops in places like Rome, Beirut, Kuwait, Muscat, Karachi, Rangoon, Singapore and elsewhere before the aircraft even entered Australian airspace.

Reaching Australia by the so-called Southern Cross route is also possible, passing through the western hemisphere. Air New Zealand used to operate across both hemispheres, via both Hong Kong and Los Angeles. The Southern Cross is also shown in red on the map.

Reports in the Australian press suggest that Project Sunrise flights will head slightly west, heading north from Sydney to Alaska and crossing the Arctic before proceeding south to London.

The map below shows this route:

Used with permission. Click here to play with this map on the excellent Great Circle Mapper.

For this map, I have had the aircraft “turn the corner” at two degrees south of Barrow in Alaska, which should avoid out of bounds Russian airspace. According to the Great Circle Mapper this route is 11,608 statute miles (10,087 nautical miles).

This is 1,035 miles longer than the great circle distance and 936 miles further than the Singapore stopover route. It is also 660 miles further than travelling via Doha, but 1,336 miles shorter than the Southern Cross route via Los Angeles.

Flight length

The flight is apparently expected to take around 22 hours. If the aircraft always heads north after take-off, I would expect that it will be affected equally by the winds in each direction. Quite how variable this is would need to be the subject of an Airbus or Qantas study.

Departure and arrival times of current Qantas services

The direct flight from Perth to London and back requires access to Gulf airspace to make it work. So the non-stop service is currently unavailable. It is however still in the winter schedule if you look far ahead enough:

QF9 leaves Perth at 7.15pm and arrives in London 17 hours and 50 minutes later at 5.05am

QF10 leaves London at 11.50am and arrives in Perth 16 hours and 40 minutes later at 12.30pm

For the flights via Singapore:

QF1 leaves Sydney at 4.15pm and arrives in Singapore at 9.35pm

QF1 then leaves Singapore at 11.35pm and arrives in London at 6.15am, for a total journey time of 25 hours

QF2 leaves London at 8.10pm and arrives in Singapore at 5.40pm

QF2 then leaves Singapore at 7.40pm and arrives in Sydney at 6.35am, for a total journey time of 23 hours and 25 minutes

Observant readers will note that after a two hour stopover each way there are only 23 block hours into London and 21 block hours 25 minutes from London. A 22 block hour non-stop is still plausible because the flight via Alaska is nearly 1,000 miles further than flying via Singapore.

QF10 to Perth takes 16 hours and 40 minutes to fly 9,009 miles, roughly 2,500 miles shorter than Sydney to London over Alaskan airspace. The A350-1000 is unlikely to cover 2,500 miles in only four hours or so.

It will be interesting to see if 22 hours as announced by Qantas really is what is published in the schedule.

So, we have:

Perth to London = evening departure and early morning arrival

London to Perth = lunchtime departure and lunchtime arrival

Sydney to London = afternoon departure and early morning arrival

London to Sydney = evening departure and early morning arrival

Let’s have a look at the options for Project Sunrise. The charts below show the departure and arrival times across the summer and winter schedules in both directions.

The horizontal axis shows the departure time in Sydney (left hand chart) and London (right hand chart). The vertical axis shows the arrival time at the other end of the route.

The blue boxes show, roughly, curfew hours when flights are unlikely to be allowed. Qantas will schedule to avoid these times. They might choose to position an aircraft at their extreme points.

In the northern winter/Australian summer:

Flights must leave Sydney before 11.30am or after 6.15pm

Flights must leave London before 1.30pm or after 8.00pm

In the northern summer/Australian winter:

Flights must leave Sydney before 9.45am or after 4.00pm

Flights must leave London before 3.45pm or after 10.00pm

We can probably assume that Qantas will want to maximise aircraft utilisation. That means not leaving the aircraft overnight in London before a return.

The QF9/10 pair has a six hour 45 minute turnaround, which is longer than strictly required to clean and cater.

Qantas will likely want the aircraft at Heathrow before 8.00pm. So in practice there are probably three options and any could work. With such a long time on the plane, it is not yet clear whether premium departures banks for other flights will also be in demand for Project Sunrise flights.

Option 1, the “long day” from Australia & the “long night” to Australia:

9.30am (Aus summer) or 7.30am (Aus winter) departure from Sydney for 8.00pm arrival in London

10.00pm departure from London for 7.00am (Aus summer) or 5.00am (Aus winter) arrival in Sydney

This option is best for business travellers expected to spend a day in the office in Sydney, or cost-conscious leisure passengers prepared to wait for their Sydney hotel. It is not great for London-bound travellers as the arrival is too late for dinner or the theatre.

Option 2, the “long night + supper” from Australia & the “long day” to Australia:

Read more

A centre of gravity is the average location of an object’s weight. Inevitably it is important for aircraft design and operations.

Ensuring that a plane is correctly weighted and balanced is traditionally a role of Revenue Management, specifically the Inventory Analysts.

The centre of gravity idea can also be applied to airline networks. For airlines operating mainly from a single hub the hub is likely to be close to the centre of gravity too.

Today’s article is about centres of gravity for airlines based in India. It shows that Indian airlines are becoming more Indian and less internationally focused. These carriers operate from many different hubs.

You can read about America’s aviation centres of gravity here.

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Advertisement:

I took a month of schedule data for July in 2022, 23, 24, 25 and 26.

For each airline I took the number of flights, the number of seats and the number of Available Seat Miles (ASM) from each origin airport.

I then took the latitude and longitude of each airport from https://ourairports.com/data/. For flights, number of seats and ASM I calculated the weighted average latitude and longitude of point-of-departure for each airline.

The maps below were produced on the excellent Great Circle Mapper – gcmap.com – which is an essential resource for everyone interested in aviation. I have put the links in so that you can play around with the maps yourself.

Centres of gravity are calculated based on the origin of flights operated by the following Indian airlines:

Air India | Air India Express | Akasa Air | IndiGo | SpiceJet | Alliance Air | Fly91 | IndiaOneAir | Star Air

There are 2,230 origin-destination pairs in this study, including seven fifth freedom routes:

Rome to Newark & Rome to New York JFK | Medina to Muscat & Medina to Ras Al Kaimah | Vienna to Washington Dulles, Vienna to Chicago O’Hare & Vienna to Toronto

The two maps below show the centre of gravity by number of flights at the top and number of seats at the bottom.

Used with permission

Play with these maps here and here

The red dot represents the centre of gravity. The two circles are 150 miles at Nagpur (NAG) and 60 miles and Jalgaon (JLG). Centres of gravity are slightly further west for seats than they are for flights.

Zoom in on the Great Circle Mapper site and you will see a small amount of movement over the years. The red dot represents flights in July 2026. Orange = 2025, green = 2024, blue = 2023, purple = 2022.

The two maps above show little change. The next map shows the Indian centre of gravity for Available Seat Miles and suggests a great deal of interesting change.

Used with permission, (red dot = 2026, orange = 2025, green = 2024, blue = 2023, purple = 2022)

Play with this map here

Note how the red dot on this map shows the focus of Indian aviation in terms of ASM moving closer to India in recent years. The circle around the red dot is 100 miles.

You might ask if this shift is being driven by fewer flights to the middle east.

Read more

A centre of gravity is the average location of an object’s weight. Inevitably it is important for aircraft design and operations.

Ensuring that a plane is correctly weighted and balanced is traditionally a role of Revenue Management, specifically the Inventory Analysts.

The centre of gravity idea can also be applied to airline networks. For airlines operating mainly from a single hub the hub is likely to be close to the centre of gravity too.

Today’s article is about centres of gravity for airlines based in the United States. These carriers operate from many different hubs.

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Advertisement:

I took a week of schedule data for every United States major and regional airlines. The week in question is 2-Nov to 8-Nov-2026, which should be a “normal” travel season, without public holidays or proximity to major peak travel periods.

For each airline I took the number of flights, the number of seats and the number of Available Seat Miles (ASM) from each origin airport.

I then took the latitude and longitude of each airport from https://ourairports.com/data/. For flights, number of seats and ASM I calculated the weighted average latitude and longitude of point-of-departure for each airline.

The links below reach three maps on the excellent Great Circle Mapper – gcmap.com – which is an essential resource for everyone interested in aviation.

Marketing carriers for each flight are represented by the following colours:

Red = American Airlines

Blue = United Airlines

Purple = Delta

Black = Alaska Airlines

Pink = JetBlue

Green = Frontier

Brown = All USA mainline and regional airlines, including the above

Spirit has been removed from the “all USA” category.

Map 1: centres of gravity by number of flights

Read more

Think of Alaska and you might imagine the remote frontier: shining peaks, immense solitudes and great whales. One of the greatest things I ever did was taking a helicopter flight and landing on an Alaskan glacier (pictured). For Airline Revenue Economics readers, Alaska Airlines might also come to mind.

It turns out that Alaska Airlines is not particularly Alaskan. Of their 7,086 flights a week in November this year, only 378 (5.3%) will be entirely within America’s largest state. Another 396 (5.6%) stretch between Alaska and the contiguous states.

Alaska is served by seven other US-based airlines. It turns out they are much more Alaskan in focus than the carrier holding the state’s name. Read on to find out how…

Advertisement:

This article was prepared using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

I collected schedule data for each of Alaska’s eight airlines for the week of 2-Nov to 8-Nov-2026. This should be a “normal” travel week as it is not proximate or part of major travel seasons, and it does not contain any public holidays.

The airlines in the study are:

4W – Warbelow’s Air Ventures | 5V – Everts Air | 8E – Bering Air | 8V – Wright Air Services | AS – Alaska Airlines | GV – Grant Aviation | K3 – Taquan Air | QX – Horizon Air.

I did not include any of the mainline carriers apart from Alaska Airlines.

Readers of the last Airline Revenue Economics article may remember that QX Horizon Air is a regional airline whose flights are marketed under the Alaska Airlines brand.

The table below shows the number of flights, seats and Available Seat Miles (ASM) operated by each of Alaska’s airlines.

Within Alaska, Horizon Air for Alaska Airlines and Alaska Airlines together operate 484 flights, 13.3% of the 3,642 total. Grant Aviation (GV) is the largest of the rest, with 1,816 flights (49.8%). The five others together operate 1,342 flights (37.0%).

When it comes to the number of seats however, the other airlines are small – between 6.0 and 9.9 seats per aircraft on average. These are frequent and reliable essential air services.

62,901 (70.5%) of internal Alaska’s 89,216 seats are marketed by Alaska Airlines. Their share of capacity is even higher – 22 million (90.8%) out of 24.2 million ASM.

Alaska’s smaller airlines fly shorter distances too. Taquan Air’s average stage length is 30.3 miles, vs 348.0 miles for Alaska Airlines mainline and 362.8 miles for sectors operated by Alaska Airlines marketed sectors operated by Horizon Air.

Grant Aviation’s average distance flown is 62.1 miles. Everts Air (5V) and Wright Air (8V) fly further – 223.9 and 135.4 miles on average, respectively. For Bering Air (8E) and Warbelow’s Air Ventures (4W), flights are a short 83.1 and 93.9 miles.

To understand the difference between all these airlines, it is helpful to look at their route maps. In the text that follows you can find links to the excellent Great Circle Mapper.

Alaska Airlines in maps

Here are Alaska Airlines’ non-Alaska services. 376 sectors are shown, counting AAA-BBB and BBB-AAA as two.

Here are the routes operated by Horizon Air and marketed as Alaskan Airlines. There are 155 sectors on this map.

Alaska Airlines operate 18 routes to and from Alaska. They share Portland (Oregon) to Anchorage with their Horizon Air partner. These routes are shown on this map.

42 routes are operated within Alaska. Four of these are by Horizon Air, shown in purple on this map. 28 routes (red) are Alaska-marketed and Alaska-operated. Ten routes (brown) are operated by both Alaska and Horizon.

The other airlines in maps

Read more

Spend a short time reading any airline news site and the largest carriers in the United States will become familiar names. Airlines generate a lot of news and planes hurtling through the air at close to the speed of sound are inherently exciting. No wonder journalists love to write about them.

American Airlines, Delta and United are the three most obvious. Southwest, JetBlue, Alaska and others will soon become apparent. Breeze, Allegiant, Sun Country and others are a bit more obscure.

But what about Commute Air, Envoy Air and Republic Airways? Old hands in America probably know exactly who these are. But you could work in old-world aviation for 40 years and never come across their names.

Yet these airlines are substantial operations. Commute Air operates nearly 2,000 flights a week. Envoy Air has just under 7,000. Republic Airways aircraft carry passengers nearly 8,000 times a week.

So who are these obscure airline brands and why have we never heard of them? The answer is found by asking a different question: who are they flying for? Read on…

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

I took a week of schedule data for 25 regional and commuter airlines in the United States. I also included the 12 mainline airlines, to make a total of 37 airlines in the study.

The week in question was 2-Nov to 8-Nov 2026, which is probably a normal-ish off-peak week without public holidays or close proximity to major travel seasons.

The 25 airlines are shown in the table below:

The ten airlines highlighted in salmon are particularly interesting. Together they operate 55,140 flights (28.9%) of all the 190,626 scheduled flights operated by airlines with any US Air Operator Certificate in our data.

Their share of capacity is somewhat lower at 14.7% of seats – 3.8 million out of 25.7 million. Their flights are comparatively short too – only 6.4% of Available Seat Miles (ASM) are operated by these airlines.

The chart below shows how they compare with each other in terms of number of flights.

SkyWest is by far the largest, with 18,324 flights. Republic follows in second place, Envoy in third and Endeavor in fourth with 7,919, 6,964 and 6,293 flights respectively. Charts plotting seats and ASM show similar patterns.

To understand who these airlines really are, we need to look at the OAG schedule data more closely. Their operating codes are as presented in the table earlier. But look at the marketing codes and a different picture emerges, as shown in the table below:

Only GoJet Airlines is operating and marketing flights itself, and there are only seven of those out of 1,968 flown by the carrier. All the others are operated on behalf of major carriers.

It turns out that a whopping 28.9% of all flights operated by US-certified airlines are by regional airlines on behalf of four major carriers.

Read more

Farewell Spirit Airlines. The American ultra low cost carrier with the yellow livery ceased operations on 2-May-2026. Read the news and Spirit’s collapse sounds dramatic. But the data suggests otherwise. This article reviews how much capacity has been taken out of the American market and which cities will be most affected.

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Spirit’s exit has been on the cards for some time. Accordingly I collected OAG schedule data for all carriers with a United States Air Operator Certificate in April, before Spirit went out of business.

The data covers two weeks this year. The week of 4-May to 10-May-2026 is in the summer schedule around the time Spirit left the market. The week of 2-Nov to 10-Nov-2026 represents their plans for early winter.

Both weeks should be reasonably normal travel times. There are no public holidays in these weeks and none of the Easter-Summer-Christmas trinity of major holiday season are imminent.

The data was collected on 25-Apr-2026, two weeks before Spirit’s last flight.

An interesting point immediately became apparent.

Spirit had scheduled 2,076 flights in the May week but 3,106 flights in the November week.

Other metrics appeared to change little in the mean time. Seats per flight were 193.3 in May and 194.8 in November. Average distance flown was 901 miles in May and 929 miles in November.

This suggests that Spirit might have been ramping down operations in the weeks prior to their exit to save cash.

Whatever the cause of the difference, Spirit represented a small portion of capacity from United States airlines. The charts below show how small Spirit was compared with others.

In May they had 1.1% of the market in terms of number of flights, 1.6% in seats and 1.3% in ASM. In November their share was 1.8% of flights, 2.7% of seats and 2.2% of ASM.

Spirit planned to serve flights from 65 airports across 290 origin-destination airport pairs in May, counting AAA to BBB separately to BBB to AAA. This included 32 international operations down to South America and the Caribbean.

Spirit was the monopoly airline on 38 of these, of which 22 were to or from Fort Lauderdale, an alternative gateway to Miami, and eight were to or from gambling hub Atlantic City.

You can see a map of Spirit’s monopoly routes here on the Great Circle Mapper.

Of the remaining 252 routes, competition with Spirit was as follows:

One competitor: 76 routes

Two: 96 routes

Three: 63 routes

Four: 13 routes

Five: 2 routes

Six: 2 routes.

On 60.7% of Spirit’s routes, they faced two or more competitors. On 200 (70.0%) of the city pairs, competitors offer twice as many seats as Spirit’s demise has removed. The competitors offered four times as many seats as Spirit on 148 city pairs.

Read more

My local bricks and mortar travel agent is Hays Travel at 16 Acorn Road, pictured above. Today they are offering promos to Marrakech (seven nights, £299pp), Ibiza (seven night, £399pp) and even three weeks cruising the Arctic Circle (£2,610pp)

Acorn Road is a shopping zone in the heart of Jesmond, a district of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of En…

Read more

When experienced Cabin Crew like to play practical jokes on new joiners they first tell them about their airline’s system of bidding for routes.

Crew are able to express a preference for one route or another. Whether or not they get it depends on how many others have bid and how senior the competition is in the pecking order.

On my recent flight from Cape Town to Amsterdam a member of the crew was retiring after 44 years of service – thanks to her seniority she was essentially guaranteed to get Cape Town as her last official trip.

Junior crew will be lucky to get their preference. So they are advised by the pranksters to make every rostered flight a bid for their preferred route.

The joke comes when entering the three letter IATA airport codes. The wily experienced rogues tell the newbies to enter the code LOS if they want to go to Los Angeles.

As many readers will know LOS is in fact the airport code for Murtala Muhammed International Airport, which serves Lagos.

The new joiners are then surprised to receive a large number of rosters to Nigeria’s largest city.

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Lagos is not a bad route. In fact many Cabin Crew prize the chance to be rostered here as the chance to earn a good slug of duty free commission is high.

But for star-struck 20 years old with visions of visiting Hollywood it is perhaps a different initiation into the world of aviation compared with what they expected.

In today’s article we will be exploring the fascinating world of Nigerian aviation. I want to answer a simple question. There are 13 airlines operating domestic flights in Nigeria next Monday (27-Apr-2026), one of which is an Abuja to Port Harcourt tag by Lufthansa. Why are there so many?

Nigerian aviation is subject to tension between government and market forces

I recently had the good fortune to deliver a training session in airline economics to representatives of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (pictured at the top of this article).

The class had three strongly held beliefs. First, Nigeria’s best days are ahead of it. Second, aviation is the key to unlocking much of the country’s potential. And third, that their particular department or area of expertise was the key.

They may be mid-level rather leadership-level officials, but they are keen to get involved and help their country develop with aviation as the catalyst. They represent the government forces. Other government forces will come from Nigerian politicians, who I have not met.

Inevitably the discussion was lively! They were a great class to teach and it was a privilege to help them on their aviation journey. Thanks NCAA!

Meanwhile government involvement in Nigeria’s aviation sector was also a topic that came up at Embraer’s African aviation summit in Cape Town, which I attended last month. Obiora Okonkwo, the Chairman of United Nigeria Airlines (pictured below), said:

“We want the government of Nigeria to see aviation as a catalyst, not as a cash cow”

“Hands off! You [the government] have no business in aviation.”

Mr Okonkwo reckons that an idea that each of Nigeria’s regional governments should have it’s own airline is a “silly idea”.

He also highlighted Nigerian aviation as distinctly Nigerian. He stated that 90% of passengers travelling to or from Cape Town Airport are not South African citizens, but 95% of passengers travelling to, from or through Nigeria are Nigerian citizens.

Mr Okonkwo represents the market forces.

Clearly there is an interesting tension between political and market forces in Nigeria’s aviation sector. Inevitably the optimum outcome will lie somewhere in the middle.

Nigeria’s international aviation market & the famous trader segment

Nigeria was one of the most interesting markets I had the chance to work with in my time at Qatar Airways.

The country is famous for it’s oil production, although this sector presents it’s own challenges. The Energy Information Administration in the United States reckons that exports declined 39% between 2015 and 24.

Mr Okonkwo pointed out that oil production is sold years in advance so Nigeria does not, for example, have the flexibility to help it’s neighbours in Africa in the event of an oil crisis.

Manufacturing is a limited proportion of Nigeria’s GDP – somewhere between ten and 20 per cent.

So entrepreneurial traders fly to Asia, buy consumer goods and ship them back to Nigeria as checked baggage. Think many bags and potentially hundreds of kilos per passenger.

Here is a picture of a group of traders and their luggage that I saw in Hong Kong last year: Notice that some of the bags are labelled “died apparel”. There were another 20 or so bags out of shot.

It is not a surprise to see the traders waiting in the First Class check-in queue. Many fly regularly and have status in the loyalty programmes. Many fly First or Business almost every time.

Traders use checked baggage rather than cargo because their bags come off the belt at Lagos. There are no “administrative surcharges” to be paid!

Next Monday 26 airlines will operate 46 international flights from Nigerian airports. You can see a route map of them here. All together the airlines will operate 9,281 seats.

Four of these airlines representing nine flights (19.5% of the total) and 1,124 seats (12.1%) are Nigerian.

United Nigeria has flights to Accra in Ghana from both Lagos and Abuja. Ibom Airlines flies to Accra from Lagos and Fly for Value Aviation has a flight from Lagos to Cotonou in Benin. These four flights together represent 316 seats and are operated with Bombardier CRJs and Embraer ER4s.

Air Peace is the largest international operator. They have five international flights and 808 seats. Their Embraer aircraft go to Ghana, a Boeing 737 heads off for Cote d’Ivoire and a 312 seat Boeing 777 proceeds to London Gatwick.

Inevitably many of the remaining airlines are big names in aviation. Ethiopian Airlines, Qatar Airways, Royal Air Maroc and Egypt Air make up the top five beside Air Peace.

The market also attracts Virgin Atlantic and I would wager they do well out of it.

A table of the international services is shown below.

Nigeria’s domestic market

I collected OAG schedule data for 24 Nigerian airports, shown in the table below. Three of these yielded no results and these are struck through in the table.

You can also see the airports on this map. The circles are a distance scale – 100 and 200 miles at Abuja.

Kano, Port Harcourt and Enugu each have 10 or 20 flights. Meanwhile Akure, Ibadan and Kaduna only have one each, to Abuja for the first two and Lagos for Kaduna.

The table below breaks down the services offered by the 12 Nigerian domestic airlines and Lufthansa of Germany with it’s Abuja Port Harcourt tag.

Air Peace and United Nigeria operate 110 out of 280 flights (39.3%) and 15,110 of 29,966 seats (50.4%).

Yet many Nigerian routes seem reasonably competitive. The table below shows the number of airlines operating on each origin-destination pair.

21 out of 66 routes have only one airline flying next Monday.

The “HHI” column stands for Hirschman-Herfindahl Index and is calculated by summing the squares of each airline’s market share by number of seats. By airline standards these HHI scores suggest that most markets are reasonably unconcentrated. Two or more airlines should compete with each other.

Thanks to demographics, Nigerian air travel demand is poised for growth

Nigeria’s population this year is more than 242 million people, according to a population pyramid on ingldata.com. 124.6 million (51.4%) are under 20.

People in African countries are less likely to fly than others elsewhere in the world. Africa accounting for more than 20% of the world’s population but only three per cent of it’s air traffic was a statistic mentioned at Embraer’s recent event.

Nevertheless the demographics are significant. There may be an enormous expansion of air travel demand as young people start earning enough to fly.

In the past 20 years mobile telecoms have opened African markets like never before. Nigeria can expect much more demand for flights as the younger generation comes of age.

Will Nigeria be able to meet it’s aviation potential?

Two factors will determine whether or not they are able to fly: capacity and price.

Read more

Sound the trumpets! Bang the gong! Ninety years! In Hong Kong!!

Today British Airways celebrates 90 years serving the Hong Kong route. They started out with a bi-plane to Kai Tak. Today they have an Airbus A350-1000 to Chep Lak Kok. Happy 90^th birthday BA in Hong Kong!

On 24-Mar-1936 an Imperial Airways 10-seater de Havilland 86 bi-plane arrived at Kai Tak Airport.

Using today’s airport code’s, it’s route was something close to PEN-SGN-DAD-HKG. Presumably at some point the plane came from London. Imperial Airways was one of the forerunners of the airline we know today as British Airways (BA).

An 80^th anniversary article in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s local daily, tells us that there were 16 mail bags and one passenger on board the first flight.

Advertisement:

I cannot tell a detailed history of BA in Hong Kong. Standard industry data sources only go back so far.

When the route celebrated it’s 80^th birthday ten years ago, BA widely publicised a launch fare of £175 (£16,040 in 2024 according to Measuring Worth, an online tool that calculates the current value of old money).

My “Mapping the Airways” book of BA route maps by Paul Jarvis shows multis-stop routes that took a week or more.

Things are much easier for me today. These days I whizz across Europe and Asia on a data-collecting Airbus A350 twin-aisle.

Hong Kong is a city I enjoy visiting and know a bit about. It has a fascinating history. And I have personally been flying there for more than 25 years. A big chunk of BA’s operating history.

So in today’s article, in honour of the occasion, I will be ruminating on Hong Kong’s place in the travel world past and present.

I will tell my story flying BA to and from Hong Kong. The highs and, occasionally, the lows. Like with BA itself, my journey to and from Hong Kong has changed. It started with Economy and has gone through First and Business too.

Occasionally a double-decker Airbus A380 was involved. A pint-sized Boeing 787-8 and Airbus A330 were involved too.

For this homage to Asia’s World City, I hope readers will forgive me a little indulgence.

The history of BA’s product & service to Hong Kong during my flying career

During my business travel career BA has operated up to three daily flights between London and Hong Kong. I think it has been at least 15 years since they had triple-daily. Sadly my data sources do not go back that far – readers are welcome to correct me…

When I first started studying the route there were Boeing 747 double-deckers operating almost every flight. Boeing 777s appeared every now and then.

The jumbos were not BA’s most premium heavy. A config with 38 Club World sleeper seats operated some of the flights. The config with 70 Club sleepers was harder to find – these tended to shuttle back and forth on BA’s trans-Atlantic routes.

When BA rolled out their remodelled Club World in around 2007-8, the config switched to 52 Club sleepers. Triple-daily would have meant more than 150 Club World sleeper seats and 42 First suites. A lot of premium capacity.

During this time I was still learning about the industry. I learned a lot of lore from the travellers on FlyerTalk.

Stories of shiny Gold card holders looking forward to middle seats when booking weeks or months ahead because that was all that was left.

Tales of BA overbooking by 100 passengers or more for the Friday night flights back to London and still going out with empty seats.

Rumours of the last-minute full-fare First Class bookers needing two front-cabin seats to Hong Kong tonight and, despite flights being full, somehow getting them.

Posts on Internet bulletin boards like FlyerTalk should be taken with a pinch of salt. But they also contain more than a few grains of truth. Twenty years ago, BA flights to and from Hong Kong really probably were like this.

In the years before COVID Airbus A380 super-jumbos and Boeing 777-300ERs ploughed the route. These two aircraft combined probably matched or close to matched the old 747 jumbo jet services, even at triple-daily, for premium capacity.

I am not quite sure when the service down-gauged from triple- to double-daily, but I can give a precise date for the change to single-daily – 17-Jul-2024. I wrote about it here on Airline Revenue Economics.

The route was down-gauged to a Boeing 787-9 with only 42 Club World seats and a mere eight in First. There are slightly more Club Suites (56) on today’s Airbus A350 but no First Class at all.

Times change. With the rise of middle eastern aviation and the inevitable decline in business traffic post-handover from 1997, Hong Kong does not need as much capacity direct from London as it used to. Cathay have the best choice of times with four or five flights a day.

But although capacity has changed a great deal, one thing that has not changed is the flight time. And these are timed for business travellers.

Flights leave Heathrow in the evening or the night, arriving in Hong Kong in the afternoon or evening local time.

I like the earlier flight. After arriving I pick up the bag and take the Airport Express into town.

Then I am exiting Tsim Sha Tsui station (lift at entrance L4) just in time for hotel check-in and a trip to the Orient Exchange in the Hankow Centre over the road to buy my Hong Kong Dollars.

The flight back to Heathrow is a grueller. With no chance of over-flying Russia at the moment it takes 14 hours via what I call “The Corner” at Mt Bazarduzu in Azerbaijan.

It leaves Hong Kong late and heads through the darkness. Passengers can eat, sleep and watch a movie, and it will still be dark outside.

Supposedly, business travellers like that flight because it arrives into Heathrow at zero-dark-hundred hours. They can impress the boss by appearing early at their desk.

As BA begins rolls out Starlink wi-fi I wonder what the future of flight times like this will be. As far as corporate travel buyers are concerned, is a day of working on a flight better than an OK night’s sleep and then being bleary-eyed all day at the office? Time will tell.

My memorable redemption experiences to and from Hong Kong

My flights to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific are stories for another day. My trip on Alitalia – an Airbus A330, in Economy, in my late teens, in 2000 – is a distant memory.

Two of my BA trips count among my greatest points redemptions ever. With only one flight a day it is not easy to find redemption seats.

In fact, my own experience suggests that BA make it deliberately harder to secure redemption seats on this route than others.

When traditionally tough points routes like California, South America and even South Africa have special points seats available using the UK’s Amex voucher to open them up, Hong Kong does not.

So back to my two awesome redemptions…

As an organisation buying business travel, the Limited company that I control is a member of BA’s On Business (OB) loyalty programme for small scale enterprises. I can double-dip on points, earning both Avios and OB points.

OB points are much more powerful than Avios – they book into revenue fare classes. My November 2024 holiday to Hong Kong was booked with these. The return was especially good value, at only 29k OB points plus £35.10. Not bad for 6,000 miles in a flying bed.

There is no fuel surcharge ex-Hong Kong due to local regulatory requirements. So I booked two one-ways and avoided BA’s YQ, which I would not have done had I booked a return ex-Heathrow.

The second awesome redemption I believe came from a BA mistake. In summer 2025 BA switched their Revenue Management logic around. They moved from Point of Sale to Point of Commencement.

Reports on FlyerTalk suggested that Avios availability was almost completely dry, even using the Amex voucher which is supposed to open up special seats in Club World and Club Europe business class cabins.

So I took a look at Hong Kong. Availability there was wide open, so I grabbed what I needed and enjoyed my November 2025 holiday. A few days later everything was closed again.

I told this story to some BA RM chaps I met a T2RL Engage in London last year, an industry shindig. They claimed that the logic change did not impact Avios availability with the Amex voucher.

But they also said I was “lucky” to get redemption seats to Hong Kong. I believe that it was BA’s mistake and I was indeed lucky. My best guess is that when the system logic changed over, seats that were meant to be kept open were closed. Meanwhile seats that were meant to be kept closed were opened. Thanks BA!

Mistake aside, the difficulty of finding redemption seats on Hong Kong shows something about the route’s performance.

Loyalty is highly profitable for BA’s owner IAG. So profitable that they make efforts to reward Avios collectors with the Amex voucher that opens Club seats and guaranteed redemptions on every flight.

No or few Club seats opened with the Avios voucher shows that BA expects to sell plenty of seats at a good yield on Hong Kong. Good enough not to earn the profits from loyalty in that market.

My memorable flying experiences

Of my five BA flights from London to Hong Kong, four have left in the early evening – 5.40pm, 5.55pm, 6.25pm and 6.40pm. This time makes for a perfect evening meal service.

On an A380 operated flight in 2019 I was taking my Mum to Hong Kong on Avios and Amex voucher – seats were not so hard to find with large planes on the route.

This flight was truly remarkable. Mum and I were having dinner together and I was in the buddy seat. Due to atmospheric refraction and fortunate timing we watched the Sun set three times and rise twice before twilight finally arrived.

I count that a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Another flight, this time on the 777, also arrived in Hong Kong just in time for breakfast, UK time. I woke up after a great sleep as the Captain came on to let us know that we were only 40 minutes out.

One of the crew saw me waking and came over to ask if I needed anything.

“Is there still time for breakfast”, I asked.

“There’s always time for breakfast” said the crewman, swiftly followed by delivery of a full English, toast and pastry selection. He must have had it ready and waiting for me!

Great service like this helps keep passengers buying tickets, boosting aggregate demand and so BA’s revenue.

Not all my flights have left early evening. When BA operated double-daily I took a flight leaving Heathrow at 8.55pm. This arrived into Hong Kong much later.

I took it because the better timed flight did not have First Class. Thanks to extensive business travel I had a Gold Guest List “Joker” priority reward voucher, which magically opens seats.

It arrived early enough to see the city in daylight from the plane, but late enough that by the time I left the airport it was dark. Plus by the time I reached Kowloon the Orient Exchange was closed. I would not fly at that time again if I had the choice, even in First.

Flight catering to Hong Kong

The dinner and breakfast service out of Heathrow is quite standard. It has been well reported elsewhere.

In First you get something like this (actually pictured on a Philadelphia flight, but with the same menu as I had on Hong Kong).

The Club meal is also good. Dinner looks like this:

Breakfast looks like this:

This late flight had a particularly unusual second meal service. Rather than breakfast, it was a duck roll and a chicken burger. I had both and they were delicious!

When it comes to catering on the way back to London, the starters are normally better than the main courses ex-Hong Kong. Here are some of the delicious starters in First and Club – duck with hoisin sauce for First and tuna tataki for Club:

And here are the corresponding main courses that are “quite good” rather than great – Hainan chicken for First and steak for Club.

BA generally excels in it’s pudds and this is just as much the case on Hong Kong as elsewhere.

One of the best bits about flying into Hong Kong on any airline, including BA, is the views

For those who have not flown the route, flying into Hong Kong is visually spectacular. You might catch a glimpse of historic Macau (top left in the image below). Depending on which side of the plane you are on there are spectacular views of either the New Territories (bottom right) and Shenzhen, or Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula (bottom left). Or both if you are lucky.

The way back from Hong Kong overnight also has interesting views. The airport is lit up. Look at Hong Kong island carefully and you can see the paths up and down Victoria Peak, including Old Peak Road and the way down from the pavilion to HKU.

Flying over China is also interesting. Every Chinese city seems to have at least one bright red light. These are static – they do not flash.

The larger the city the more there are of them. What these are I have no idea – answers on a post-card…

I normally get to sleep somewhere a bit after Chengdu.

But flying BA to and from Hong Kong has not always been perfect

There was only one time when I was actually annoyed with BA on the Hong Kong route. On my 2023 flight they did not deliver my bag in both directions.

I would not have minded if they had told me on the plane, or put up a sign at the carousel like the BA team at Tokyo Haneda do. I had to stand at the carousel for 45 minutes while everybody else picked up their bags.

If they had told me straight off I could have simply obtained the Property Irregularity Report online and gone into town. The delivery of the late bag was fine. The communication was not. That is modern aviation in a nutshell.

One other time things went wrong I was not annoyed with BA because these things happen and the service recovery was great. My flight was delayed only a few hours away from departure due to lack of a part.

We all needed to wait until the replacement part came from London on the next BA flight. BA did a good job of looking after us – you can read about it here.

A historical perspective on why Hong Kong became an important BA market

To truly understand why Hong Kong became such an important centre of trade and finance warranting hundreds of First, Business and Premium Economy Class seats a day to and from London, a spot of history is required.

Last year I read Patrick Conner’s fascinating book “The Hongs of Canton”. A Hong, also known as a factory, was essentially a national trading post. There were thirteen of them and the first was established around about the 1680s.

Read more

Airline bosses in the Gulf are now taking some of the hardest decisions of their careers.

In the face of conflict with Iran they must first decide whether to up-gauge re-launched operations, maintain a controlled evacuation schedule or make a strategic suspension.

Their decisions now will influence their market share, customer trust, brand perception and even possibly the entire future of mass market Middle Eastern aviation hubs.

Next they must figure out how to handle ticket holding passengers who have either not started their journey or are part of the way through, but not actually in the Gulf.

Unfortunately their rebooking policies reveal a state that is operationally savvy yet strategically underprepared.

And finally they must look after their passengers stranded in transit. This group have perhaps the worst outcome of all. They are away from home in a region at war and little if any practical alternatives to get out.

Monday’s article addressed the first two challenges. In today’s article I will be looking at the third. Specifically, I wanted to find out just how big a problem stranded passengers are and which hubs are most affected.

I will be using schedule data and my own arrivals and departures model to answer four questions.

Q1: How many passengers were arriving in Gulf airports ready to transit when airspace was closed?

Q2. How many passengers were about to leave Gulf airports when airspace was closed?

Q3. What was the net impact of arriving and departing passengers on transit volumes when the crisis began?

Q4. Which airports were worst affected, relatively speaking?

Advertisement:

This article was prepared using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Q1: How many passengers were arriving in Gulf airports ready to transit when airspace was closed?

I had to make four sets of assumptions to get the model going.

First up was seat factor for large carriers who use the Gulf airports as their home base. I used reported average seat factors from the incumbent home carrier’s annual report. These were;

Abu Dhabi = 89.9%, based on Etihad’s published Jan-26 numbers

Bahrain = 81.6%, based on Gulf Air’s reported 2024 numbers

Doha = 85.0% based on Qatar Airways’ 2025 annual report

Dubai = 78.9% based on Emirates’ FY24-25 annual report

Kuwait = 74.5% based on news reports about Kuwait Airways from 2017…

Kuwait’s stat is relatively old so please treat it as indicative rather than precise.

Next I needed to make assumptions about seat factor for other airlines. I used the same numbers as for the incumbent at each separate airport.

The third assumption was about the proportion of passengers connecting. Arriving passengers not in transit do not have quite as raw a deal – they already had visas and hotels booked or homes to go to. They are not covered by this model.

I assumed that at Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai 75.0% of passengers were in transit if they were on Etihad, Emirates Flydubai, Qatar Airways or (for Doha only) British Airways, who partner with Qatar Airways. For Bahrain and Kuwait I assumed 50.0% for Gulf Air and Kuwait Airways passengers.

For offline transits, possibly on separate tickets, I assumed 10.0% for Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai. I assumed 5.0% for Bahrain and Kuwait.

I also assumed that before the strikes on Iran began, the airlines were operating normally with every flight roughly on time.

The chart below shows my estimate of arriving passengers at five Gulf airports on:

1. The day before the crisis began – Friday

2. On the day the crisis began (Saturday) but before the first strikes on Iran

3. The time after the crisis began just after 6am GMT but before airspace was closed just after 9am GMT (the blue box)

4. The time after airspace was closed (the orange box).

The blue line represents the number of passengers set to enter transit at each time, according to my model.

After airspace was closed, the blue line of passengers arriving in the orange box becomes hypothetical. Many of these passengers would have been on flights that diverted to Muscat, Riyadh or elsewhere, or turned around and headed back for home.

The charts show that the timing of the strikes were bad news for all the major hubs.

In Abu Dhabi the first strikes on Iran were just before an arrivals peak. This is unfortunate because many passengers will have started their airport transit just before the strikes began and not all of them will have had time to make their connections.

At least it was the smallest such peak of the day. My model suggests that up to roughly 3,000 passengers an hour will have entered transit at Abu Dhabi around that time.

At Doha the strikes on Iran started roughly in conjunction with their second largest arrivals peak. So Qatar Airways will have suffered the same issues as Etihad but with a higher proportion of their daily passengers.

More than 6,000 passengers an hour could have entered Doha transit at this time.

Dubai suffered roughly the same story, at their largest arrivals peak of the day, My model suggests that 8,000 passengers entered transit from Emirates and Flydubai, among others, in the busy hour just before the crisis began.

The charts also show that the number of affected passengers transiting Bahrain and Kuwait may have been quite small. With this in mind it is easy to see why news reports focus on Abu Dhabi, Doha and Dubai.

For the rest of this article I will show Bahrain and Kuwait in the charts but leave you the reader to form your own commentary on these two airports.

Q2. How many passengers were about to leave Gulf airports when airspace was closed?

The next set of charts show the same five airports as before, but with gross flight departures instead of arrivals.

The charts show that if flights were going out on time, Etihad had almost completed their morning departures bank by the time that airspace was closed. Up to 3,000 transit passengers an hour could have escaped Abu Dhabi in time.

At Dubai on the other hand, the busiest hour was over and around 9,000 transit passengers should have escaped in time.

But the departures peak extends over several hours and it was likely that around 8,000 transit passengers were left behind immediately after UAE airspace was closed.

My model suggests that a similar story may have been played out in Doha.

Q3. What was the net impact of arriving and departing passengers on transit volumes when the crisis began?

The modelling needs to get a little more complex at this stage. Unfortunately not all passengers arrive and then head off on the next flight.

Some linger because their only viable connections are long. Others choose a long connection to achieve a price advantage. So I have made some more assumptions about how long passengers take to connect.

These produce a new set of curves for the number of passengers in transit at any one time. Because of the “lingering” effect I mentioned, these curves are flatter and less peaky than those shown in the previous two questions.

I assumed that:

1. All passengers make their connections within eight hours – with a seven hour window to connect.

This is on the basis that when I was at Qatar Airways we made eight hours the lowest limit for a free Doha stopover. I doubt that many passengers with more than eight hour connections can be truly said to be in transit.

2. I assumed that two sevenths of passengers (28.6%) leave two hours after they arrive and the same proportion leave three hours afterwards

This is also aligned with my experience at Qatar Airways. Many passengers enjoy rapid connections, even if some do not.

3. I assumed that one seventh of passengers (14.3%) leave four hours after arrival

4. I assumed that one fourteenth of passengers leave each hour in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth hour after arrival.

These assumptions and the same data as used to answer the previous two questions produced the results shown in the following charts.

At Abu Dhabi somewhere between three and six thousand passengers are likely to have been stranded in transit.

At Doha, my model suggests that around seven and a half thousand transit passengers were stranded, but possibly up to twelve thousand, almost as high as the airport can cope with.

This is because the outbound peak coincided with the airspace closure. If passengers were on flights that got out in time they were lucky.

And the same may be true at Dubai. Between 10,000 and 20,000 could have been stranded in transit.

Q4. Which airports were worst affected, relatively speaking?

The next set of charts show the same results as in the previous section. But they have been redrawn to show passengers in transit as a percentage of the day’s maximum.

Read more

It is far too early to evaluate the impact of war in the Middle East on Gulf aviation. Scenarios ranging from rapid recovery to prolonged disruption and even catastrophe are all plausible at this stage.

If the conflict ends swiftly and Iranian regime change transforms a pariah state into a friend of the west, the region and it’s aviation hubs could boom like never before. Iran Air could become the new darling of global airlines.

On the other hand the region’s airport infrastructure is subject to more physical and operational risk than ever before.

Runways are hard to destroy – craters can be filled in and concreted over. But remaining aircraft, hangars, fuel farms, lighting, baggage and cargo systems, terminal buildings and Air Traffic Control towers are not. There might be a serious incident.

In bad cases, the airlines might never recover.

One thing is for sure. Information appearing from the region should be treated sceptically. These countries do not tolerate criticism of their state apparatus or their leaders. And aviation is very much a part of the state out in the Gulf.

In this article I wanted to evaluate three things. First I will present my thoughts on what the crisis really is and why it matters for Gulf airlines.

Then I will analyse published rebooking policies for the major airlines in the region. I find that they suggest the airlines were unprepared and possibly naïve. I also present my model rebooking conditions that I think airlines should adopt.

In the next article (this Wednesday) I will present my analysis of arrivals and departures in the Gulf around the time the war began. The timing, which led to airspace closure just after major arrivals banks, was unfortunate. In fact, it could hardly have been worse.

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

Advertisement:

What this crisis really represents for aviation in the Middle East

At the time of writing the large airlines are either operating an extremely limited number of flights or not operating at all.

I looked on FlightRadar24 as I wrote this article. The table below summarises what I found. Across the region it shows an up to 94.9% reduction in flights.

The first column shows flights that were scheduled to operate on the day the crisis started. The second column the flights that were operating at lunchtime one week later.

The third column some notes on the nature of the flights, showing that not all Qatar Airways flights were to or from Doha, and that Qatar Airways had cargo flights operating. If aircraft were turning their transponders off they might be missing from this data.

The re-launch of operations is not, in my view, a return to normal.

They look to me first of all like an attempt for the Sheikhs in charge to save face.

Emirates Group including both airline operations and dnata produced $39.6bn annual revenue and $6.4bn profit in their 24-25 financial year. Etihad generated $476 million profit and $6.8bn revenue in 2024 according to their own statements.

Nominal GDP in the United Arab Emirates was $552.3bn (£412.9bn) in 2024, according to the World Bank. Take away Abu Dhabi’s oil and gas, and aviation represents a significant slice of this pie. The Sheikhs will want to keep up the appearance of things going normally.

The re-launched flights also appear partly designed as a controlled evacuation, like lifeboats on a ship. Launching and operating the “boats” involves a degree of risk. So does staying on a “ship” that may or may not be sinking. Individual passengers must judge the risk for themselves.

Flight movements like this present three sets of challenges. First is staff rostering. I would hope that the operating airlines are crewing the flight only with volunteer Flight and Cabin Crew, and providing appropriate risk pay.

If flying is compulsory for Flight and Cabin Crew or risk pay is not thought fair, some staff may not be keen to return to duty once they reach a safe country. Eventually the airlines could have aircraft stranded and crew shortages.

The second challenge is safety. Airborne Early Warning and Control monitoring aircraft appear to be patrolling the skies to ward commercial planes away from risks, according to FlightRadar24. But no avoidance system is perfect and Iran’s behaviour may be unpredictable.

In addition the downing of three F15s by friendly fire in Kuwait opens the possibility of a terrible yet unintentional tragedy.

The third challenge is in customer expectations. Air travel is difficult, unusual and expensive for most consumers. Travellers based outside of the Gulf may trust the airline implicitly and not form a realistic judgement of the risk of travel themselves.

Leaving passengers stranded in transit at the beginning of the conflict is terrible but forgivable. Allowing it to happen again is not.

Middle Eastern airlines are now faced with an unprecedented cocktail of risk.

High fuel prices, loss of revenue, unknown future impact on demand and the risk of aircraft being shot out of the sky are bad enough.

But while these airlines score highly on safety audits, they also prize public image. Some have a legacy of an overbearing management culture. None of the countries impacted have a free press or a culture of disputing the government’s line.

Combining these factors with current events could produce a high stress operating environment prone to error and misjudgement.

They must now decide whether to up-gauge the re-launched operations, maintain a controlled evacuation schedule or make a strategic suspension. Their decisions now will influence their market share, customer trust, brand perception and even possibly the entire future of mass market Middle Eastern aviation hubs.

Airline rebooking policies suggest they are unprepared and possibly naïve

I lived in Doha working for Qatar Airways between 2007 and 2012. From time to time I asked people what they thought about the risk of conflict with Iran. I was lucky to be able to discuss this topic with both senior executives and my peers.

Most people had not given serious conflict a second thought. Almost none were happy to discuss it.

The American, European and Australian members of the leadership team at Qatar Airways I spoke to appeared to have little if any knowledge of contingency plans. One senior executive, a CEO direct report, told me in that he had heard there were plans but did not know what they were.

Understandably, the Gulf airlines have not yet made significant public comment about the crisis. What they have published is their rebooking policies. These are defined by Revenue Management, normally the head of Inventory Management. They are absolutely within the core scope of Airline Revenue Economics.

Reading the rebooking policies, it looks to me like the airline’s senior leadership team are unprepared. They also appear naïve.

There are five causes for concern.

First is an apparent focus for immediate cash preservation rather than long-term passenger retention.

Qatar Airways only permits rebooking to flights within 14 days and only for flights before 15 March. Emirates allows rebooking to 30 April but only for passengers booked until 31 March. Etihad is slightly more generous in one sense but not another – they allow rebooking to 15 May but only for flights on or before 21 March.

Gulf Air seems to have copied Etihad. Flydubai is allowing rebooking within 30 days of the original journey. I cannot even find a rebooking policy on Kuwait Airlines website – if you can and I am missing something obvious, please let me know.

The airlines appear to still be in the seasonal world of Revenue Management, preserving seats for the Easter and Summer peaks. If the crisis continues, those peaks are probably already gone.

Instead the airlines should permit any passenger on any flight to rebook or cancel, up to a reasonable limit.

I would suggest at least 30-June for the time being, and increase this limit day-by-day. Most passengers book at most three or four months ahead.

Knowing that they can rebook or cancel will give passengers confidence to book alternative airlines, while they are still available at reasonable prices. It should also help passengers who have not yet started their flights feel that they can still trust flying with a Middle East airline.

Such generous terms for rebooking and cancellation will come with a significant operational impact for the airlines though. If permitted without limit they will flood the call centre with requests about flights far in the future and the call centre will not be able to cope.

This leads to the second cause for concern with the rebooking policies – they need to reassure travellers that their journey will be addressed, but not necessarily immediately. I would suggest a statement that only journeys up to five to seven days in the future will be handled by the call centre.

Qatar Airways says that passengers should only contact them if flying with 48 hours. That seems sensible for the immediate term but might be too little as time moves on. Starting with 48 hours and moving to five to seven days later could work.

Emirates, Etihad and Gulf Air all remind passengers that they should approach their travel agent if the flight was not booked with Emirates. That also seems sensible.

If I were running the call centre, I might advertise accepting changes for flights five days in the future but informally accept changes from customers with flights up to seven days, provided this is operationally feasible at the time.

The third cause for concern is confusion about bookings made with loyalty points. Reports on FlyerTalk, a bulletin board, suggest that rebooking requests are being rejected if tickets were paid for with points.

Airline loyalty generates large amounts of income for airlines. It is unreasonable for airlines to treat changes for loyalty bookings different to cash bookings at this time.

Next up if flippant coverage of refunds. The policies should make it clear to passengers that if a refund is issued the travellers will lose their rights and consumer protections.

It should also be obvious that a refund may not be sufficient to cover a passenger’s costs of buying a new ticket if they are currently part way through their journey.

Airlines should not necessarily be encouraging passengers to take a refund at this time, especially if the travellers are only partially through their journey.

They have a moral and in some markets a legal duty of care to their passengers. It should be clearer that passengers will understand that they relinquish their consumer protections when requesting a refund.

The fifth and final cause for concern is the lack of clarity regarding the ability of Middle Eastern airlines to re-book on other IATA carriers.

There will be many re-protection agreements in place, specifically designed for cases of extreme disruption. Rebooking policies should make it clearer exactly when and where agents are authorised to rebook to partner airlines.

All the causes for concern suggest that Revenue Management have designed rebooking policies for short-term operational disruption and not achieving long-term strategic objectives.

Good rebooking policies must protect passengers, preserve goodwill and reduce pressure on the call centre servicing bookings. Unfortunately, the current policies appear to achieve little or none of these.

To some extent this scenario is beyond Revenue Management’s pay grade.

Airline CEOs and management boards have had decades to consider the risk of an Iran crisis, which while somewhat unexpected at this exact time was not a bolt from the blue.

The published rebooking policies present cause for concern. They reveal airlines that are operationally savvy yet strategically underprepared. The lessons they learn now and how quickly they adjust to emerging events could impact their ability to operate profitably for years to come.

My model rebooking policy

This proposal is more focused on protecting passengers, preserving goodwill and ensuring the operational stability of the call centre.

Read more

Delft Blue houses are a KLM signature. The Dutch flag carrier has been handing them out to their long-haul Business Class passengers since the 1950s. The iconic ceramics are in the shape of historic Dutch buildings and filled with gin.

The little houses are intended to reflect Dutch history, culture and tradition. I hope to pick up one each way when I fly KLM for the first time in a few weeks.

Which got me thinking. Airline networks are shaped a great deal by the history of their home country. Especially in the old world. So I decided to investigate the influences of history on the Air France-KLM group’s network design.

In particular I wanted to investigate whether economic history or home country culture matters more for airline network design. I analysed the data to answer two questions:

Q1. To what extent are today’s airlines serving their home country’s former colonial possessions?

Q2. Is Air France shaped by glitz and glamour and KLM shaped by finance and trade?

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

The two countries are quite different, culturally speaking. France is flamboyant and known for it’s love of culture, cuisine and couture. The Netherlands is a bit more direct. Both nations were built on long-distance trade.

Data & methodology

I took a look at both airlines’ networks next week (9-Mar-2026 to 15-Mar-2026) using OAG schedule empire. I classified their non-European destinations as follows:

Former Dutch colonial empire: Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Formosa (Taiwan), Indonesia, Sint Maarten, South Africa, Suriname

Sabe & Sint Eustatius are not served by Air France-KLM next week

I did not include Dutch trading posts elsewhere in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia & Japan that were not formally part of the Dutch empire. I did not count former Netherlands possessions like New York (New Amsterdam) in North America

French overseas departments: French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion

Air France-KLM does not appear to fly to Mayotte in Comoros next week

Former French colonial empire: Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Vietnam

Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, French Polynesia, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Mali, New Caledonia, Niger, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Martin & Syria are not served by Air France-KLM next week.

I did not count former French possessions in North America (Louisiana and Quebec) as part of the former French empire

Fifth freedom flights carry passengers between two third-party countries as part of a mission starting or finishing in either France or Netherlands. These are counted as half a flight. Seats on these planes are counted as half a seat.

Q1. To what extent are today’s airlines serving their home country’s former colonial possessions?

Here are the results:

Just under a third of Air France flights are scheduled to head off to the former French empire and current overseas departments. Roughly a sixth of KLM flights serve the former Dutch empire.

Interestingly, when capacity is considered the two airlines move in opposite directions.

32.5% of Air France flights serve overseas France and former French colonies, but only 28.8% of seats and 20.3% of Available Seat Kilometres (ASK) serve the same markets.

Meanwhile at KLM, 16.2% of flights are to the former Dutch empire, but 17.5% of seats and 17.1% of ASK serve the same markets.

Q2. Is Air France shaped by glitz and glamour and KLM shaped by finance and trade?

I classified the following destinations as glamorous: Dubai, Buenos Aires, Bridgetown Barbados, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore, New York (Newark and JFK), Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco

I thought that these were the sort of places that influencers might hang out. Do you agree? Answers on a postcard…

The other destinations were all classified as ‘trade’. Note that all the glamorous routes are going to have a large amount of trade traffic associated with them as well.

Now here is the same table as before, but with glamorous and trade destinations split out.

Read more

Last week AirAsia X launched a fifth-freedom route. The nimble Malaysia-based airline will operate a flight from Kuala Lumpur to London Gatwick via the Gulf island nation of Bahrain, pictured.

But at the same time as announcing the flights, they said what at first glance seems to be a lot more too.

Advertisement:

This article was written using data from OAG Schedules Analyser: visit oag.com. Thanks OAG!

The introduction to the press release said…:

Commencing on 26 June 2026, these strategic routes establish Bahrain as AAX’s first global hub, strengthening its role as a key gateway between Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe

…and AirAsia’s side said:

Bahrain as our strategic aviation hub allows us to connect Asia with the Middle East and Europe more effectively while creating a scalable platform for future growth

It sounds to me like AirAsia is looking at turning Bahrain into a hub, not just a connecting point for so-called fifth freedom flights which originate or terminate in Malaysia and proceed to a third country via Bahrain.

The press release went on to say:

This partnership [enables] Capital A businesses such as cargo and MRO services to scale alongside AAX. Today, Teleport marks an important milestone as its first flight arrives in Bahrain, following its recent USD50 million capital raise

Capital A is the company which incorporates all of AirAsia’s businesses. Teleport is a logistics provider that calls itself “asset light”. It sounds like AirAsia is making a commitment to Bahrain, but quite how big or small this commitment will be remains to be seen.

The Bahraini side of the press release also says:

The investment … will create direct employment across aviation operations and generate wider opportunities across tourism, logistics, hospitality, and related services [and] support skills development and long-term career pathways for Bahrainis

It seems that Bahrain expects a lot of benefits.

The press release leaves three interesting questions unanswered.

First is whether Bahrain will have it’s own AirAsia airline brand – AirAsia Bahrain – under a Bahraini Air Operator Certificate (AOC).

The launch date is imminent, only four months away. The first flight is operated by AirAsia X under it’s Malaysian AOC.

Perhaps AirAsia is doing a trial run before making the big commitment that basing a fleet of planes and a maintenance operation in Bahrain would involve. On the other hand, maybe they just want to get started quickly and the AOC will follow.

Bahrain’s remarks certainly seem to indicate that they expect further investment and an AOC could be part of that. Bahrain is in Asia if not the far east, so AirAsia Bahrain would be slightly further to the west but still on-brand for the airline group.

On the other hand, Teleport’s investment is likely to be “asset light” and perhaps the airline’s will be too.

If AirAsia Bahrain was set up as it’s own operation, it would be easy for passengers to transit between flights. Transit certainly seems to be part of the plan. The press release also says:

Leveraging Bahrain’s strategic location and aviation structure, the KUL-BAH-LGW service anchors a multi-sector route anchored on transit and partnership opportunities.

Which leads to a second question: if AirAsia does not set up it’s own AOC in Bahrain, will it transfer passengers between alternative fifth freedom flights?

Such an arrangement would certainly be unusual. Transiting from one flight to another under the sixth freedom of the air is practiced by almost every airline.

Transiting from a third freedom flight that terminates in one country onto an onward fifth freedom is rarer but practiced. An example would be taking British Airways flight BA11 from London to Singapore and then transferring onto British Airways flight BA15 which flies from London to Sydney with a stop in Singapore.

I do not see why a third to fifth freedom transfer would not be viable. In the “olden days” of aviation with airlines like BOAC operating multi-stop flights it would have happened all the time. But I have never personally come across arrangements like this in my time in the business so far.

This suggests to me that AirAsia may be considering a Bahrain AOC and an AirAsia Bahrain sub-brand.

The third and final interesting question left unanswered by the press release is where else AirAsia might be looking at flying to and from via Bahrain.

Bahrain has a more limited air travel market than Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain across the water.

In tomorrow’s schedule 46 destinations are served from Bahrain. Only five of these – Qassim in Saudi Arabia, Goa in India, Baku in Azerbaijan, Mangalore in India and Najaf in Iraq – are not served by either Emirates, Etihad or Qatar Airways on the same day.

Meanwhile 135 out of 176 destinations served by the “big three” middle eastern airlines are not available from Bahrain tomorrow. One of these is Kuala Lumpur, which is taken care of by the new entry.

94 of these 135 are routes that might be plausibly served by AirAsia Bahrain to passengers originating in Malaysia.

Read more

The minimum number of Cabin Crew required to operate an aircraft is determined by each airline’s national regulator. While one Cabin Crew member per door is not a hard and fast rule exactly, it is probably a pretty good approximation.

For the maximum number of Cabin Crew, count the number of Cabin Attendant Seats, also known as jump seats.

I wonder if in theory there is nothing to stop an airline boarding additional crew for an extra-attentive service and having them occupy passenger seats? Answers on a post card…

Advertisement:

A solid airline Cabin Crew management process has seven ingredients:

1. Planning – figuring out how many crew are needed at a given point in time

2. Rostering – assigning specific people to specific flights

3. Crew tracking – so the airline can understand where crew are in real time

4. Reporting – notifying operations managers, dispatchers and gate agents when crew arrive ready for duty

5. Logbook – helping crew record all their duty hours

6. Change management – for example, operating a flight when a rostered crew member reports sick

7. Route bidding – helping crew fly where they want to fly, subject to priority rules covering seniority and operational requirements

The systems need to focus on legality – ensuring that Cabin Crew do not exceed their permitted hours and that all flights are appropriately staffed. They also need an element of flexibility to facilitate recovery in times of disruption.

But there is also a cost management element – a crew management system needs to incorporate the cost of overstays, deadheading and crew staying in hotels vs crew returning to their home base into it’s decisions.

I think there is an opportunity for a startup in the crew management software field to integrate Revenue Management (RM) demand forecasts in real-time into the planning and rostering stages.

The idea is that airlines who are able to use RM forecasts can allocate crew further in advance and more efficiently to flights that are lightly or more heavily loaded, and flights that generate higher or lower revenue.

For example, flights that are expected to be lightly loaded may need fewer crew. Flights that are expected to be higher revenue may be an opportunity for airlines to deploy their most highly skilled and Cabin Crew to deliver the best service possible.

It would have to be the type of startup that is looking to create something to sell on rather than transform the industry. The current vendors may not be too far off.

Do current Cabin Crew management systems really need to integrate an RM forecast?

Existing Cabin Crew applications help crew understand real-time passenger information. Think the iPads that you see crew holding on an increasingly large number of airlines.

These show loyalty status (used for meal priority), plus anything the airline knows about a passenger’s preferences or typical service requests.

Such information is made available to Cabin Crew in “real-time”, but are in many ways a digital daughter of the old Passenger Information List that you can see printed out and pinned to wall somewhere in the galley. They are defined at the time of the flight, when things are controlled by airport Departure Control Systems (DCS).

Integrating an RM forecast into crew planning and management software would take place at an earlier stage, when things elsewhere in the airline are handled by the Computer Reservation System (CRS).

It is unlikely that a crew planning and management system would interface with CRS directly to roster according to forecast load and revenue. It would interface directly with RM.

Why might a real-time RM forecast be helpful for Cabin Crew planning?

I think there are seven potential benefits of incorporating RM forecasts in Cabin Crew planning and management. Together they are a pathway to dynamic and variable crew rostering that flex staffing around demand and regulatory requirements, in the same way that RM flexes availability around a capacity constraint.

First-up is forward-looking demand-driven shaping of rosters. Far in advance, RM can flag flights or periods expected to be above normal load. This might be driven by seasonality, for example flights over Christmas being busier, but it is likely that crew planners already account for this.

More exciting is the possibility of RM telling crew planners that certain points in the year or particular flights are expected to be busier or quieter than usual. This would allow the planners to adjust their roster accordingly, potentially saving money.

Read more

In an industry characterised by operational complexity, intensive optimisation and attention to every conceivable detail, the numbers can get very complex very quickly.

But sometimes, simple numbers provide powerful results. Today’s article is about three of these:

1. Why is daily service so much better than five-days-a-week?

2. Why is 3-3-3 abreast (pictured above) a more common aircraft configuration than 2-5-2 abreast?

3. Why is carry-on baggage a bigger issue for continent- and region-sized low-cost carriers than long-range full-service airline brands?

Now read on…

Advertisement:

1. Why is daily service so much better than five-days-a-week?

Imagine an airline flying a route once a week. Say out on Monday and back on Monday. Passengers have one choice – out Mon-back Mon.

Suppose they double the frequency to twice-weekly. Say out Mon and Wed, back Mon and Wed. Now passengers have four choices – out Mon-back Mon, out Mon-back Wed, out Wed-back Mon, out Wed-back Wed.

Three frequencies give nine combinations, four frequencies 16. Five frequencies give 25 choices and seven, or daily frequency, gives 49.

Moving from one weekly frequency to two doubles the cost commitment to a route but quadruples customer choice. A fine return in many cases.

In the same way, increasing frequency from five-weekly to daily doubles consumer choice for a 40% cost penalty. This is why daily service is so much better than five-days a week.

Even if flights are not so busy on two or three of those days, airlines might be able to charge more on the flights that are, covering the cost and maybe even earning a surplus.

Eventually this strategy runs out of puff in all but a few longhaul markets. But there are plenty of short-range services where high frequency is prized. on short business trips for example people will value the chance to come back on the same day they arrive.

Double-daily service gives 196 combinations, four-times daily. Triple-daily gives 441 and quadrule-daily a whopping 784.

The marginal extra flight a day runs into returns that are increasing but diminishing though. Double-daily services offer four-times the choice of daily. But triple-daily offer 2.25-times as much choice as double-daily. Quadruple-daily offers 1.78-times the choice of triple-daily.

On the day this article is published BA is scheduled to fly nine times a day from London Heathrow to New York. Add three codeshares with American Airlines and the frequency is an enormous twelve flights a day, counting both JFK and Newark airports as New York.

Yankee competitor United Airlines is scheduled to operate six flights on the route and groovy-funky Virgin Atlantic offers four flights. That is a considerable choice.

Emirates out of Dubai to London is another example of a high-frequency long-ish range route.

On London to Los Angeles, another prime route, the BA-AA pair offers four flights a day. When I flew to Dallas there was a choice of four AA and one BA flight.

On some routes, choice looks high at first glance but in practice is a bit more limited.

BA offer an early evening and late night departure from London to Singapore, for instance. But both of the return flights are late night departures arriving at zero dark hundred hours.

This type of overnight scheduling was considered desirable in a business travel heavy world. Long-range daylight flights are sometimes known as the Chairman’s Special because only the Chairman dare take them.

As the airline industry moves to on-board connectivity I think we will eventually, over decades, start to see more daylight services. Many workers and their bosses will consider a short day of good work better than a long day of poor work following a red-eye.

2. Why is 3-3-3 abreast a more common aircraft configuration than 2-5-2 abreast?

Read more