I’ve had some time to think about the new Virgin Atlantic / Delta Airlines deal and several things have occurred to me which make this a bigger threat than I think anyone necessarily perceived including me.

Virgin Atlantic knows its trade across the Atlantic and its got the London Heathrow slots to make a  lot happen for Delta.  For the first time in 30 years, American Airlines and British Airways may be facing a very real threat to their lucrative trans-Atlantic business.

Virgin has the aircraft and airports slots and Delta has the network.  Delta has the network feed into New York City and enough network to actually draw Oneworld (AA/BA) customers away from Dallas and Chicago to Atlanta and New York City and even Detroit.  AA and BA won’t lose their O&D traffic in those cities but it could lose a great deal of the network feed into those cities in favor of a Delta solution.

This will happen just as American Airlines prepares to scale up its operations with 777-300ER aircraft onto those routes and just as British Airways prepares to take delivery of its first Airbus A380s.  If Willie Walsh and Tom Horton aren’t cursing Richard Anderson, they should be.

Virgin has 747-400 and Airbus A340-600 aircraft that it can throw at routes to the US and a newish fleet at that which represents great service and certainly service competitive with AA and BA.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax