Air Transport

British Airways (BA) is to begin a daily service from London Gatwick to New York JFK this winter but, at the same time, will suspend its Manchester link to the US airport.

The new daily Gatwick link to JFK will begin on 27 October and take to 62 the number of weekly flights BA operates from London to JFK – it already operates 55 flights a week from Heathrow. It will deploy Boeing 777 aircraft on the route.

BA general manager for network planning Lynne Embleton says: "The new Gatwick service will give our customers even more choice when flying between London and New York. Not only do we already have an extensive schedule from Heathrow to both JFK and Newark but next year we will launch business-only flights from London City."

Delta Air Lines and Zoom Airlines already operate on the Gatwick-JFK link.

But BA will suspend its daily flight from Manchester to JFK in October. It will instead move the Boeing 767 currently deployed on the service to Heathrow. The route is served by a daily Delta Air Lines 757-operated service, while Continental Airlines operates 757s twice-daily from Manchester to Newark.

The US link is the only international route BA operates itself out of Manchester. It continues to operate flights linking Manchester to Heathrow and Gatwick.

BA also today announced it will this winter begin short-haul connections from Gatwick to Oporto in Portugal and the Spanish city of Valencia, together with adding frequencies on its Alicante and Turin services. It will also switch its Warsaw flights from Gatwick to Heathrow.

Source: flightglobal.com's sister premium news site Air Transport Intelligence news