With British Airways due to get some 787s soon, will there be a chance that they will send some to San Diego? I know that they are replacing the majority of the 767s, and some 777-200ERs. They are due to operate to IAD, EWR, YYZ, YYC first.
And with the 787s coming into the fleet, will there be a chance they might start service to Portland [PDX] with it?
I think the 777 does well in SAN so I don’t see them changing any time soon. Note that all the places they’re sending the 787’s to in North America first are Star Alliance hubs where they are competing against nonstop flights to LHR from Star Alliance carriers. BA probably struggles to fill the plane. In SAN they are the only transatlantic flight and have a fairly large AA frequent flyer base to draw from.
I think PDX would be on their radar, but it’s an awfully long flight and they already fly to SEA to connect to the Alaska Airlines system. They may instead look at returning to DTW or flying somewhere that has a larger AA presence with no TATL service like STL, MCI, AUS, SAT, or MSY. The largest market in the U.S. they don’t serve is DTW by far.
I checked BA Flight schedules, and the the 777 should be operating at SAN for almost the next year. Maybe if BA wants to up the capacity at SAN they might add 2x 787 daily. It would be a while for that to actually happen.
I just saw that BA ordered 18 A350s, so maybe those will be used on the LHR to SAN route in the future.
They are not firm… They are just commitments. I actually don’t see BA sending their A350s to SAN anytime soon. The 787 would be a good fit because it almost has the same seating capacity as the 777-200ER. The A350 is awfully larger than the 777-200ER, so I think BA will have have a hard time filling in those extra seats.
LHR-SAN is operated by a 3-class 777 which seats 50+ more passengers than BA’s 787’s will.
True, the 777-200ER’s BA operates into SAN seat 275 people, while the 787-8’s will seat 214 people. BA could have 2 daily 787 flights LHR-SAN-LHR (428 seats), but 2 daily 772 flights seem less likely (550 seats).
I agree. Now that I checked the stats, BA has commitments for the Airbus A350-1000, which Airbus says should seat at least 350 people in a 3-class configuration. Given its size and (242 ft long, wingspan ~210 ft) the A350-1000 might be too big for a SAN-LHR nonstop. SAN’s runway weight limits and proximity to higher ground would likely force BA to stop somewhere (PHX?) like they used to a while ago when the 747-400 was used @ SAN(1990s).
All info via wikipedia.org