On flight-tracking apps the Atlantic Ocean looks like an airborne equivalent of a bustling motorway, with hundreds of flights crossing daily between Europe and North America.
Carriers on both sides of the Atlantic have resumed transatlantic services in the last few months and plan to add further capacity – but what about the uncertainty posed by the Omicron variant of COVID-19?
According to the air navigation services provider NATS, before COVID-19 there was an average of 1,300 daily flights across the North Atlantic – making it the world’s busiest area of oceanic airspace.
London to New York has long been a particularly strong market. Independent air transport expert John Strickland, director of London based JLS Consulting, told Aviation News that when he joined British Airways (BA) as a network planner in the 1980s the carrier had three daily flights to New York with a Club class of roughly 90-100 seats. He recalled: “We filled every one of those seats on every flight every day. We had the same number of people on the waiting list as we had capacity.”
London-Heathrow to New York-JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport) became even more popular in subsequent years. By the 2000s, annual passenger nu…
