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British Airways plans to fly the tiny Airbus A318 across the pond

by Scott Carmichael (RSS feed) on May 28th 2009 at 4:00PM

British Airways has announced its plans to fly on the London City - New York JFK route starting this October.

Now, news like this normally gets ignored by us, unless it involves cool and interesting locations, neither of which are included in this announcement.

What makes this news worth writing about, is that the route will be serviced by the small Airbus A318 plane. This plane is seriously small for a transatlantic jump. It is based off the Airbus A320, the same plane used by Jetblue on their routes.

The planes will be configured with business class seating only, so British Airways is clearly hoping there is enough cash left in the banking world to fly people between London City and Wall Street.

On the way to New York, the plane will have to stop in Shannon, because London City airport is not large enough to let it take off with a full load of fuel! Shannon has the added bonus of being home to a US Customs and Immigration facility, which will prevent passengers from having to deal with long lines at JFK. This also means that BA will be flying its first ever domestic arrival at JFK.

I sure hope BA knows what they are doing, because this route sounds like more work than it is worth. Fingers crossed that their beancounters did their homework, and this won't be the beginning of another route doomed to be canned after a few months.

Filed under: Europe, North America, United Kingdom, Airlines, Airports, News

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ncsustash May 28th 2009 4:13PM

That just doesn't make sense. The time savings traveling to London City rather then Heathrow surely are lost by having to land, deplane, and replane in Ireland

Phil May 29th 2009 12:58PM

What on earth does deplane & replane mean, I think this chap meant to say from the english/french embark & disembark.

That appart the commuting time from Docklands to LHR can be considerable & the 319 is a truly frugal aircraft so despite it's downtime at Shannon, it could prove profitable on this route, certainly Docklands has the type of passenger business class volume that would serve this route.

Joe May 29th 2009 5:42AM

This doesn't make any sense because they have fleet of 757s under their Open Skies subsidiary that have to fly to Paris and Amsterdam. I'm sure they would like to land in London too, but all the slots are used, or were they are grounding part of the fleet.

I could possibly see this with a A321 or A320 but a 318 is way too small to be worth the economies of scale.

johnmc May 29th 2009 9:13AM

Sounds interesting. I wonder if there's any way to cut the trip short and just do the JFK-SNN part of it.
On the aircraft size, Frontier flies the A318 (as well as the A319).