LGW to NYC

Was catching up with the Inside Gatwick program on Sky1 and heard Gatwick had courted AirAsia X away from Stansted.

Sure I heard them say they wanted AirAsia X to start a route to New York as customers were crying out for that route.

Why would Virgin not be top of the list to ask to add that route to their Gatwick flights ? ?|

I assume at the beginning of VA's life there was a LGW - NYC route, was it just dropped to move the "business" traffic to LHR?

thanks

David

The issue will be for AirAsiaX to get landing/take-off slots at either JFK or EWR.

But am not sure the demand is there. I read that DL was reducing its LGW-NYC flights but that could just be down to winter schedules

I would guess LGW's definition of "crying out" is far different than any operating airline's one... Tonty's likely right that this is going to be seasonal, summer has a lot more connections out of LGW to holiday destinations and the demand may well be higher, but if DL is curtailing its schedule, I find it hard to see how a different airline would find the demand to be there year round. DL also runs a significant number of summer flights to destinations like PSA, which get shelved in winter. They run older planes on those routes, without the VS style business class, essentially operating part of their airline as close to a low cost operation to european holiday destinations.