Transatlantic connections: how many British Airways flights to the US will return?

Plane Talk: Charleston and Pittsburgh are among the British Airways US routes that have fallen off the map

BA will resume more US flights (PA Archive)

How gratifying to see British Airways operating weekly between Heathrow and two islands in the mid-Atlantic Azores next summer – the Portuguese islands comprise a magical archipelago.

Yet those flights will not be continuing west. I suspect BA customers on either side of the Atlantic are more interested in whether the full complement of links will return when the coronavirus pandemic is finally deemed to be over.

The “full year results announcement” from IAG is dated 28 February 2020, but it seems from a different age.

“Quarter 4 was strong with an operating profit of €765m,” reported the British Airways parent company. That works out at more than £7m per day – or, if you prefer, £5,000 per minute.

The announcement also talked of “new routes such as London Heathrow to Charleston [and] Pittsburgh”.

Eighteen months on, and the world of aviation – and BA’s place in it – looks unrecognisable. The “billion-dollar” route that British Airways had created on the link between London Heathrow and New York JFK has vanished, with far fewer flights each day between the two airports, and business travel dried to a trickle. A presidential proclamation means that the handful of passengers on board are almost all Americans.

But with Joe Biden promising to open up the US at last in November to British and other European travellers, the ban is soon to end – at least for those of us lucky enough to be double-jabbed.

The inexplicable policy has caused plenty of short-term harm to airlines and their passengers. But how will the future look? Not so much in terms of frequency (a dozen BA flights a day between LHR and JFK seems a long way off) but in breadth. In other words: are all those US routes coming back?

You and I can dash off a top 10 of locations which are bound to be on the Terminal 5 destinations screens: Boston, New York JFK, Washington Dulles, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It is the second tier that is susceptible to suspension, which could be just for a season – or “indefinitely”, signifying little chance of a rapid return. I have checked the schedules for 4 December this year, by which stage the travel ban will be well over. Some of the eastern links I thought might be in doubt are still there – Philadelphia, Baltimore and Tampa – but Newark is missing.

For many New York-bound travellers, the route is handier than JFK, but BA’s partner American offers few onward connections.

Charleston and Pittsburgh, as celebrated in that IAG results announcement, have disappeared. They were both brave ventures, using the Boeing 787 to fill in gaps in the network and serve cities that did not have a heavy demand from business travellers. So you might venture, given the collapse in corporate travel, that they should be kept on. That appears to be the case with Nashville, which is still going through the winter – though not daily.

Further west, Denver, Phoenix and Seattle remain on the books, but Austin, San Diego and San Jose have been shelved, for now at least. They are all routes that were heavily dependent on business travel.

Sean Moulton, the airline schedule analyst, says: “Joe Biden’s announcement will benefit BA and Virgin most from the UK, not just in direct connectivity but also feeding their hub at Heathrow.

“The announcement brings some certainty to the market, which will help improve the visiting friends and relatives [VFR] and leisure sectors.

“But it is currently uncertain if and when the business market will return.”

The Azores adventure – to a location with almost zero business travel – suggests British Airways shares that uncertainty.