Roland Perry wrote:
In message
, at 10:33:56 on Tue, 2 Sep 2014, Recliner remarked:

What it needs to do is shift some of the non-hub flights away from Heathrow.

The airlines operating those flights obviously thought it worthwhile to pay
for expensive slot pairs at Heathrow, instead of the much cheaper ones at
Gatwick or the even cheaper ones at Stansted.

But with limited capacity they need to make decisions about which are the
mist valuable flights to continue from Heathrow.

Gatwick actually lost *all* of its US airlines to Heathrow.

Yes, but back in the day every US electronic component company thought
they had to be in Bath Road, Slough.

These are recent decisions.

The fact is that the demand is overwhelmingly at Heathrow, while
Gatwick says it has 25% spare capacity.

But if the cost (political etc) of expanding Heathrow is too high...

That's why the decision has been out off till just after the election. If
they were going to choose Gatwick, they could have done so at any time.