News: Northwest to start transatlantic flights to Hartford (USA)
Flights > News > # 1032 (20/10/2006)
The first direct transatlantic flights to Connecticut from Europe will launched next summer, giving travellers to New England the opportunity to avoid congested New York and Boston.
Northwest Airlines’ daily flights between Connecticut’s state capital Hartford and Amsterdam take off on July 1. Partner airline KLM offer links from most major UK airports to Amsterdam.
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Comment:
How many passengers are there who want to fly point-to-point between Hartford in Connecticut and Amsterdam? Northwest might only be using a Boeing 757 on this route, but are business links between these two cities really strong enough to support daily flights between them?
Northwest are marketing this flight as an opportunity for passengers living in, or travelling to, the densely populated region between New York and Boston to avoid having to use either of these cities' congested airports, and to fly through Hartford instead. The convenience of using local airports is always well worth having, but it becomes even more valuable if it enables a direct flight to be taken to, or at least near to, the destination concerned.
The UK has always generated more transatlantic traffic than any other European country, with Britain accounting for around 40% of all US-bound flights from Europe, and New England in particular maintains strong links with "the motherland". We would not be surprised to find that at least half the passengers using Northwest’s Amsterdam to Hartford flights will actually be travelling to or from the UK, rather than the Netherlands or any other European country.
How about Heathrow to Hartford flights?
In the grand scale of things, this new route might look like a pretty small development, but does it serve as a prime example to support the arguments used by organisations calling for more capacity at Heathrow, in order to prevent even more passengers using other European hub airports? If there are more people in London who want to fly to Hartford than there are in any other European city, then shouldn't Northwest have been adding flights from here instead?
The reality, of course, is never as simple as the lobbyists might want us to believe. The Bermuda Treaty prevents Northwest from offering any flights into Heathrow, so their remaining transatlantic flights have to use Gatwick instead. Additionally, Northwest have no partnership arrangements with major British airlines, whereas their close alliance with KLM makes it much more logical to continue to bolster their presence in Amsterdam. This will also allow them to tap into the huge number of regional UK airports which KLM serve.
