Missed connections: the direct flights you won’t find flying out of London

As British Airways re-launches services from Heathrow to Tehran, and US airlines reconnect with Cuba, Simon Calder considers the air routes that don’t exist

Fare wars have done their part to chase away a number of potential links (EPA)

The OAG Pocket Flight Guide devotes 45 pages to London; as the world capital of aviation, it easily outscores Paris (29 pages), Amsterdam (18) and Frankfurt (15). Yet among the hundreds of destinations from Aalborg to Zurich, there are some key omissions from the UK capital.

On Thursday, British Airways re-launched its link from Heathrow to Tehran, albeit six weeks later than originally planned. BA has also restored a couple of Latin American routes this summer, from Gatwick to both San Jose and Lima – with the Chilean capital, Santiago re-joining the network in January.

With Colombia now tentatively at peace after decades of civil war, BA could soon go back to Bogota. But the capital of neighbouring Venezuela is unlikely to feature on the route map any time soon. Caracas used to have frequent competing flights from Heathrow on British Airways and the national airline, Viasa. But two decades ago the latter went bust, and shortly afterwards BA pulled its flights, as the once oil-rich republic slumped into economic despondency.

While healthy airline profits depend on cheap fuel, for some locations low oil prices spell decline. Flights between the UK and the former Soviet Union have slumped along with the price of oil.

Travellers used to be able to buy a BA ticket from Heathrow to Yekaterinburg, gateway to Siberia, and to the Azeri capital, Baku. And a bold decision to put a long-haul Boeing 747 on the Heathrow-Moscow route was abandoned, with a narrow-bodied Airbus replacing the Jumbo.

The link from London to Port Harcourt in Nigeria has disappeared, though BA continues to fly to the Angolan capital, Luanda. “Oil and diamonds,” confided a former chief executive of the airline when I asked what was driving traffic to Luanda.

Several former British possessions in Africa may lament that the UK flag carrier still flies to a former Portuguese colony after turning its back on Dar es Salaam, Entebbe, Harare, Lilongwe, Lusaka and others.

While Air France, Brussels Airlines and TAP Portugal preserve some links to former colonies in Africa, the continent is now largely the preserve of Turkish Airlines. From its hub in Istanbul, it serves more destinations in Africa than any other carrier.

War has put paid to some previously successful links, such as London to Aleppo and Damascus in Syria. Ariana Afghan used to fly from Gatwick to Kabul, and indeed offered cut-price fares to destinations such as Delhi and Kathmandu via its hub in the Afghan capital.

Fare wars, though, have chased away far more links. In the last century British Airways has served every mainland state capital in Australia. But now Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth are accessible non-stop from the Gulf, which makes them only two hops away from Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle as well as the main London airports, Heathrow and Gatwick. BA cannot compete with that offer. It now flies just a single Boeing 777 once a day from Heathrow via Singapore to Sydney. With Virgin Atlantic giving up on Australia’s largest city, rumours abound that BA may scrap Sydney too.

Qantas continues to fly daily from Heathrow to both Sydney and Melbourne with an Airbus A380 “SuperJumbo”, but has so far shown no appetite for a London-Perth non-stop – which would simultaneously put the Western Australian capital back on the route map, and become the longest air link from the UK. While such a flight is technically perfectly possible, the market may not exist to fill it profitably.

The most notable absentees from the Heathrow route networks, though, are UK regional airports. While major aviation hubs typically offer many domestic connections, pressure on slots at Heathrow means that British airports have lost links with the capital: Birmingham, Durham Tees Valley, Jersey, Liverpool, Plymouth and Prestwick are all now disconnected, though BA has just restored its Heathrow-Inverness link.

UK aviation is in the bizarre position that you can fly to many more regional airports from Amsterdam, Dublin, Paris and even Malaga than you can from the capital's main hub, Heathrow. Proponents of a third runway have promised to address this problem if Heathrow is awarded the prize.