Summary British Airways operates 17 non-US transatlantic routes to Canada, Latin America, & the Caribbean with 30 daily flights on average. The most extensive part of BA's network includes 9 routes to the Caribbean, mainly using its fleet of aging B777-200s. British Airways has eight fifth-freedom routes, with ANU-SKB being the world's shortest B777 service at just 63 miles.
British Airways has long been a pioneer of transatlantic flying. Its predecessor, BOAC, initiated the first-ever transatlantic jet service between London Heathrow and New York Idlewild in 1958, using a de Havilland DH.106 Comet 4.
Since then, British Airways famously used Concorde from 1976 to 2003 to provide transatlantic service at supersonic speeds with Concorde, cutting the journey from London to New York to just over 3 hours. This past summer, British Airways operated 28 different routes to the United States, more than any other European carrier, and more destinations than any US carrier offered flying the other way to Europe. Some of these routes are immense: It has eleven flights a day from London to New York, with eight LHR-JFK using B777-200s and 300ERs, two LHR-EWR using B787-10s, and one LGW-JFK using a B777-200.
But the US is not the only transatlantic destination for British Airways, so what does its non-US transatlantic network look like? Some 26 US airports will see the carrier. The non-US transatlantic network According to Cirium , an aviation analytics company, British Airways’ non-US transatlantic network this September is made up of 17 routes to Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These routes depart from London Heathrow (LHR) and London Gatwick (LGW) , and collectively they will provide an average of 30 flights a day in both directions over the course of the month.
Particularly interesting is that British Airways also operates eight fifth-freedom flights in the Western Hemisphere, all but one of which connect different islands in its Caribbean network. These flights haven’t been included in the calculation of routes or the number of flights, as they aren’t truly transatlantic, but we’ll discuss them further in the article. Routes to Canada British Airways flies four routes to Canada, including a twice-daily service to Toronto , its largest non-US transatlantic route.
It competes with Air Canada on the route, which offers four daily flights using B777-300ERs and B787-9s. British Airways also flies twice daily to Vancouver but with separate routes from LHR and LGW. The LHR-YVR route also competes with a daily Air Canada B777-300ER service.
The airline utilizes its newly acquired A350-1000s on the YYZ and YVR routes. These aircraft have 331 seats, with 56 in Club World business class, 56 in World Traveler Plus premium economy, and 219 in World Traveler economy class. Routes to Latin America British Airways flies to four destinations in Latin America, all from LHR, including daily service to São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City.
The São Paulo route competes with LATAM, which has a daily B777-300ER service, while the Mexico City route competes with Aeromexico’s daily B787-9 service. The route to Santiago is flown four times weekly, and the nearly 15-hour flight (outbound) is the longest route in the British Airways network, eclipsing the 6,758-mile route to Singapore. The flight to Rio de Janeiro is also notable as it has a subsequent fifth-freedom connection to Buenos Aires (replacing the former direct LHR-EZE service).
While British Airways has no competition for the LHR-GIG sector, it competes with both GOL and Emirates’ own fifth-freedom flight on the GIG-EZE route. Despite serving all six inhabited continents, British Airways' longest long-haul flights aren't nearly as long as other airlines. Routes to the Caribbean The routes to the Caribbean are the most extensive part of British Airways’ non-US transatlantic network, with a total of 9 routes that are flown predominantly by the airline’s aging B777-200 fleet (average age of 24.
5 years). The exception is the LHR-BGI service, which utilizes the brand-new B787-10. With the airline set to receive ten more of these aircraft, we can expect to see them gradually replacing the B777-200 on more Caribbean routes.
The routes to Nassau in the Bahamas, Vieux Fort in Saint Lucia, and St. John's in Antigua and Barbuda are particularly notable, as they provide fifth-freedom connecting service to other Caribbean destinations (see below). It is also noteworthy that with the traffic to Caribbean destinations being largely driven by leisure travel, British Airways preserves its precious slots at LHR and sends six of the nine routes out of LGW.
The 5th freedom flights British Airways’ GIG-EZE sector is its longest fifth-freedom route, but it has seven additional fifth-freedom routes across the Carribean. Of its 18 flights to St. John's in September, six will go on to connect to Basseterre in Saint Kitts and Nevis, and five will connect to Oranjestad in Aruba.
The six-times weekly Nassau service connects five times a week to Grand Cayman and once weekly to the British Overseas Territory of Turks and Caicos Islands. Meanwhile, Vieux Fort in Saint Lucia is a stopping-off point for flights that alternate between St. George's in Grenada, Georgetown in Guyana, and Crown Point in Trinidad and Tobago.
The ANU-SKB routing is particularly noteworthy as it is the shortest scheduled B777 service in the world, beating the 72-mile Ethiopian Airlines service between Douala in Cameroon and Malabo in Equatorial Guinea into second place. The gigantic British Airways B777-200 competes somewhat ludicrously with Caribbean Airlines’ ATR-72 service between the two islands. With it scheduled as a 90-minute service to cover just 63 miles, it surely spends more time on the route pushing back and taxiing than actually in the air.
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