AER LINGUS is trying to do a bit of horse trading to gain an extra slot at Heathrow Airport that would allow it to boost its Shannon service to three flights a day. The Irish airline is already the third biggest holder of slots at Heathrow.
Chairman Colm Barrington told me this week that the load factors on Shannon-Heathrow are “okay” and it is keen to tweak the schedule. “Our timings aren’t great and so we are trying to arrange a better schedule,” he said. “It is possible we might get another slot at Heathrow and we could go three times a day at Shannon.”
Aer Lingus recently traded a slot at Heathrow with British Airways for slots in Gatwick, which were used for the launch of its new base at the London airport. “The trading of slots goes on all the time.”
Barrington said Aer Lingus is “pushing ahead” with plans to run a transatlantic service from Washington to Madrid from next April in partnership with United Airlines of the US.
United executives were in Dublin this week to run through various details. Barrington said there was a possibility that the joint venture would operate under a new brand. “That might be the way it turns out but at the moment the brand is Aer Lingus.”
Barrington and his senior executives are working on yet another plan to reorganise Aer Lingus. He wants to deal with some of the “legacy” work practices at the airline and improve productivity.
With Aer Lingus’s passenger traffic and average fares both down sharply this year, Barrington has indicated that everything is up for consideration.
He declined to comment on what changes the airline will seek to implement but said a set of proposals should emerge in late June. A lot of speculation surrounds its long-haul services to the United States. Again, Barrington was coy but he hinted that the current services to New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando and Washington will be trimmed.
“I think Aer Lingus needs to concentrate on the gateways and feed traffic into Jet Blue or United ,” he said. To my mind, the obvious gateways are New York, Boston and Chicago, possibly with summer flights to Orlando.
On the search for a new CEO Barrington met yesterday to with its executive search firm to draw up a “medium” list of candidates. “There’s a good deal of interest in the job,” he said.
