OAG reveals world's busiest routes
Excerpting: "The route between Barcelona and Madrid has retained top spot on the list of 'world's busiest routes' with the highest number of flight operations (971 per week), closely followed by Sao Paulo Congonhas/Rio de Janeiro (894 per week), Jeju/Seoul Gimpo (858 per week) and Melbourne/Sydney (851 per week). These statistics have been compiled by OAG BACK Aviation Solutions, a division of flight information and data solutions company Official Airline Guide (OAG), by tracking frequency (volume of flights) on its renowned schedules database. [...] Analysis of European routes shows that Amsterdam/London Heathrow is the busiest international route."
Now I had heard claims that Dublin / London was meant to be up there and indeed the Dublin Airport Wikipedia page makes a claim (which I now regard as debatable) that the Dublin - London air corridor is "the second busiest in the world (after Hong Kong-Taipei) with around fifty daily flights from Dublin to all five London airports: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, and London City". If we can amalgamate all the LON airports together, I wonder how busy the LON/AMS corridor is in comparison to the LON/DUB one. (It might be possible to measure business of a route in different ways with different conclusions: most movements, most passengers, most cargo, biggest revenues and so forth.)
The really interesting thing about the Barcelona/Madrid corridor is that a high-speed rail line is set to be opened by the end of the year, reducing journey times from six hours to two and a half with suspicions that this high-speed rail line will do for the "air bridge" route what Eurostar has done for London-Paris and London-Brussels. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I believe that 6-to-2.5 claim at face value; high-speed rail goes some of the way already, so perhaps six hours was the duration before any of the high-speed rail was in place between Barcelona and Madrid, and using the high-speed rail in place now cuts the duration down to somewhere between the two figures.)
The question arises: what's going to happen to all the aeroplanes that are currently used to operate the BCN-MAD route should (over time) the train take, say, 70% of the route's custom away? Wikipedia suggests the route is operated by Air Europa, Spanair and Iberia and that Spanair will change their focus slightly towards Algeria, but I'm tempted to wonder whether there will be any increased focus on flights between the UK and Spain. (Not that we're not well-served by the LCCs already!)
The other open question is to wonder whether the success of Eurostar at replacing London/Paris and London/Brussels airline traffic might inspire Eurostar to attempt to replace at least some of the London/Amsterdam airline traffic before long, especially if Railteam get their ticketing sorted out before long. There has been discussion of Eurostar serving Amsterdam from 2010 onwards in the past, too. I suspect that's more a political matter than anything else, though.
Regards,
Chris
Excerpting: "The route between Barcelona and Madrid has retained top spot on the list of 'world's busiest routes' with the highest number of flight operations (971 per week), closely followed by Sao Paulo Congonhas/Rio de Janeiro (894 per week), Jeju/Seoul Gimpo (858 per week) and Melbourne/Sydney (851 per week). These statistics have been compiled by OAG BACK Aviation Solutions, a division of flight information and data solutions company Official Airline Guide (OAG), by tracking frequency (volume of flights) on its renowned schedules database. [...] Analysis of European routes shows that Amsterdam/London Heathrow is the busiest international route."
Now I had heard claims that Dublin / London was meant to be up there and indeed the Dublin Airport Wikipedia page makes a claim (which I now regard as debatable) that the Dublin - London air corridor is "the second busiest in the world (after Hong Kong-Taipei) with around fifty daily flights from Dublin to all five London airports: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, and London City". If we can amalgamate all the LON airports together, I wonder how busy the LON/AMS corridor is in comparison to the LON/DUB one. (It might be possible to measure business of a route in different ways with different conclusions: most movements, most passengers, most cargo, biggest revenues and so forth.)
The really interesting thing about the Barcelona/Madrid corridor is that a high-speed rail line is set to be opened by the end of the year, reducing journey times from six hours to two and a half with suspicions that this high-speed rail line will do for the "air bridge" route what Eurostar has done for London-Paris and London-Brussels. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I believe that 6-to-2.5 claim at face value; high-speed rail goes some of the way already, so perhaps six hours was the duration before any of the high-speed rail was in place between Barcelona and Madrid, and using the high-speed rail in place now cuts the duration down to somewhere between the two figures.)
The question arises: what's going to happen to all the aeroplanes that are currently used to operate the BCN-MAD route should (over time) the train take, say, 70% of the route's custom away? Wikipedia suggests the route is operated by Air Europa, Spanair and Iberia and that Spanair will change their focus slightly towards Algeria, but I'm tempted to wonder whether there will be any increased focus on flights between the UK and Spain. (Not that we're not well-served by the LCCs already!)
The other open question is to wonder whether the success of Eurostar at replacing London/Paris and London/Brussels airline traffic might inspire Eurostar to attempt to replace at least some of the London/Amsterdam airline traffic before long, especially if Railteam get their ticketing sorted out before long. There has been discussion of Eurostar serving Amsterdam from 2010 onwards in the past, too. I suspect that's more a political matter than anything else, though.
Regards,
Chris
