TABLE OF CONTENTS Historically, BA s competitive position in through markets via London owed much to the advantage it derived from the sheer scale of flight activity at Heathrow, both in terms of service frequencies and in range of destinations served. London has always been an extremely important point on the international air services map. London s role as a leading political, commercial and cultural centre generates an enormous demand for air travel, and from this there developed a vast set of possibilities for connecting traffic. But hitherto London s success as a transfer point has been in terms of interline connections and, when the emphasis changed to online connections, its airports system was not ready to accommodate the change, rather like the system in New York.
In this respect BA s ability to compete for online connecting traffic has been hampered in ways similar to the problems that beset the former Pan American airline in the United States. Pan Am s main base was in New York which, like London, has been heavily congested for some time; and the operations of Pan Am in New York were split between two airports, just as BA s are split between Heathrow and Gatwick. Pan Am operated only a limited number of domestic routes and tended to rely on interline connections to supply feeder traffic from elsewhere in the United States. But with the demise of interline arrangements, other airlines increasingly preferred to feed their own hubs rather than supply interline passengers to carriers like Pan...
