Which airlines have the most Heathrow airport take-off and landing slots?

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• dan_a_man says:

  25 Sep25 September 05:59

  Curious where the info is from that Aurigny (not Aurigney) requested Heathrow slots? We havent had Heathrow flights since Flybe temporarily took over unused slots (what a glorious time that was).

  • Rhys says:

    25 Sep25 September 07:58

    It’s in the official slot coordination report!

    • PeterK says:

      27 Sep27 September 09:15

      Aurigny applies every season for LHR slots, as do other carriers. A proportion of any new slots at LHR are allocated to ‘new entrant’ carriers but new slots are few so the ‘new entant’ number is a small number of a small number!

• Erico1875 says:

  25 Sep25 September 06:37

  I’d like to see similar data for FRA, AMS ,CDG and MAD.
  It would be interesting to see how much of a monopoly each of the flag carriers have in their home country

  • insider says:

    25 Sep25 September 08:13

    British Airways’ (or IAG’s) monopoly is less monopolistic than AF-KLM in Paris / Amsterdam and LH Group at Frankfurt. For example, there aren’t many other European airlines that have a direct long-haul competitor at their hubs (as is the case with Virgin)

    • air_niugini says:

      25 Sep25 September 09:36

      virgin competing with ba? for what? who can make you the most miserable and least value for money and

    • Londonsteve says:

      26 Sep26 September 10:26

      I suppose the key difference between LHR and other European hubs is that while the other European legacy airlines might have an even higher percentage of slots at those airports, they’re not nearly as capacity constrained as Heathrow and therefore, should they wish to, challenger airlines are able to acquire slots much more easily. The market for passengers wanting to fly to Amsterdam and Frankfurt is far smaller than London and without the benefit of a route network via which your passengers can continue their journey, there’s limited appeal for yet another flight into a giant airport that serves a small city when the likes of AF-KLM and Lufthansa already operates a dense timetable. London needs a 4 runway hub as a minimum, the investment would repay itself in economic growth many times over.

• Roberto says:

  25 Sep25 September 06:42

  Your maths are off.
  The sum of the slots is not 9220 as per your article.

  • Chas says:

    25 Sep25 September 07:12

    Rhys has only listed the top 25 slot holders, so there will be many more airlines whose slots I’d imagine would take the total to 9,220.

  • roger says:

    25 Sep25 September 07:13

    May be less than 0.5% are not listed in table?

  • Rob says:

    25 Sep25 September 07:34

    Only 25 airlines are in the table.

• Kiran_mk2 says:

  25 Sep25 September 07:13

  So with BA having an odd number of slots, does that mean that some flights have a weird frequency or does this allow for maintenance flights from (for example) Cardiff?

  • Alex Sm says:

    27 Sep27 September 07:40

    Maybe this is because of flights landing on Sunday and departing on Monday? Counted as different weeks

• Stuart says:

  25 Sep25 September 07:40

  Surprised BA were requesting more slots, they can hardly run what they’ve got at the moment

  • planeconcorde says:

    25 Sep25 September 08:00

    +1
    Eight out of ten of my last ten BA domestic and short haul flights have been at least forty five minutes late. The two “on time” were only fifteen minutes late. Don’t get in started on the advanced notice cancellations.

    • JDB says:

      25 Sep25 September 09:02

      @planeconcorde timekeeping has been a massive problem right across Europe this summer and is obviously worse at congested airports like LHR. It has been a terrible summer for weather, specific ATC issues but also wider ATC congestion across Central Europe which is likely to continue.

  • Richie says:

    25 Sep25 September 08:19

    Sort UK261 out and give a truly independant regulator teeth and watch things change for the better.

    • JDB says:

      25 Sep25 September 09:06

      @Richie no regulator across Europe enforces 261 and we won’t rewrite the rules (save perhaps for domestic flights) on our own. There is a huge divergence of opinion between the commission and individual countries. I think one should also be careful what one wishes for – if 261 were rewritten, it is likely to have aspects that will be less favourable to the passenger.

    • will says:

      25 Sep25 September 12:14

      What 261 really needs is an independent judgement for every late flight to attribute the delay to either the airline or factors beyond their control.
      Once you have that you’re practically there.

      I did recently have to laugh at Ryanair wanting compensation for the recent ATC meltdown though.

      They tell passengers who are out of the scope of regulatory compensation to go to their travel insurance but expect to be able to get away with getting the gov to compensate for an ATC meltdown rather than taking out their own insurance against such events.

  • JDB says:

    25 Sep25 September 08:59

    @Stuart of course BA always asks for slots. If it doesn’t, someone else may get them and they are then lost effectively forever. BA will eventually resolve its staffing and aircraft shortage issues.

• Doug says:

  25 Sep25 September 09:28

  what surprised me, at first glance, is that Virgin are second and that United have more slots than American.
  Now, what would make an interesting sequel to this article, is how many destinations can be flown directly from LHR and how many cannot.

  • Rob says:

    25 Sep25 September 09:45

    United has no alliance partner so that’s not entirely surprising. I suspect AA may have leased / sold / given slots to BA over the years for JV purposes because BA presumably is a better brand than AA out of London.

    • AJA says:

      25 Sep25 September 10:31

      I thought United was a founder member of Star Alliance which would mean it partners with Lufthansa. Whether customers would fly FRA-LHR-EWR is another matter.

      • Rob says:

        25 Sep25 September 10:38

        Exactly. They don’t.

      • jjoohhnn says:

        25 Sep25 September 10:43

        No Joint Venture partners on atlantic route like others.

        LHR is big for United. They recently took on the old BMI hanger there for maintenance.

        • Rob says:

          25 Sep25 September 10:51

          … and hired a huge number of BA engineers by offering far better money, hence the number of aircraft currently out of service.

    • Michael Jennings says:

      25 Sep25 September 15:22

      Back in the olden days, Pan Am and TWA were the only only US airlines allowed to use Heathrow. Pan Am sold their Heathrow operation to United and TWA sold theirs to American, and both United and (later) American entered the Heathrow market with a big chunk of slots. All the others had to accumulate slots from scratch when the rules were changed a little under 20 years ago.

• pigeon says:

  25 Sep25 September 10:31

  Hmmm, the long term consequence of letting BA take BMI over. Not sure it was the right decision…

  • Rob says:

    25 Sep25 September 10:53

    Star should have bought BMI purely for the slots and shared them out. Was a once in a generation opportunity.

    • Jetset Boyz says:

      25 Sep25 September 11:05

      They certainly did help themselves to a large portion of BMI’s slots before selling to British Airways.

• jjoohhnn says:

  25 Sep25 September 10:44

  Is the list in the table the airline that owns the slot, or the airline that is using the slot?

  • Rob says:

    25 Sep25 September 10:51

    Using.

  • marcw says:

    25 Sep25 September 18:52

    Technically airlines don’t own slots. They own the right to use a specific slot (and that can be traded).

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