A startup airline calling itself Odyssey Airlines has ordered 10 Bombardier CSeries aircraft to use on a startup venture providing business class service between London (London City Airport) and New York City (JFK) in direct competition with British Airways who currently provides such service with A318 aircraft.

The airline says that by using these aircraft, a stop in Ireland wouldn’t be necessary. 

I’m scratching my head over this.  The CSeries is planned to offer as much as 2800nm of range and that route is about 3500nm in distance.  Granted, reducing the seat count makes for a lighter aircraft and stretches range but this still feels a touch pie in the sky at this moment.

In addition, how many seats can you fly and will it really make sense on a trip cost and per seat cost basis?  I’m going to guess that, at most, they’ll manage a 2-1 aisle configuration and no more rows than the BA A318 (8 rows) giving just 24 seats vs British Airways’ 32 seats.  That doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy either.  Yes, BA has to stop in Ireland on the way to NYC.  It also has the infrastructure there to do that with very small incremental costs. 

Furthermore, British Airways has a business class brand and the infrastructure in both London and New York to make the business class traveler feel pampered.  It’s a trusted service product and I don’t think you can pop up and attract travelers to your business without lowering prices substantially.  The truth is, these flights aren’t sold on price anyway.  They’re sold on service and if others can’t beat British Airways service, what makes Odyssey think they can?

This is a stinky plan, in my opinion, using the wrong aircraft (which *will* need ETOPS to do this by the way) and I don’t think it gets off the ground in the long run.  If the demand is actually there already, British Airways would serve it with more frequencies using more A318s.  They might not have anymore in the fleet but sourcing a long haul A318 isn’t exactly hard to do since anyone who owns one is generally looking to sell it.

I do not see this taking off, pun intended, and I think it’s more publicity related than anything else since you don’t need 10 aircraft to do the London-NYC run from London City Airport.  One wonders if there is another agenda going on with this startup that hasn’t been revealed yet.

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