EasyJet aims to cash in on Heathrow's third runway

EasyJet wants to launch 19 new routes and base up to 30 aircraft at Heathrow, after the airport yesterday won the Government’s backing to build a third runway.

The budget carrier has set out plans to operate 30,000 to 55,000 flights per year from the UK’s biggest airport.

This would be about 7% of total slots at an expanded Heathrow, compared with BA’s current dominance with 51% of slots, while Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic have 5%.

The airline, piloted by Carolyn McCall, said it would launch new routes to Inverness, Isle of Man and Jersey, and offer increased services and more competition for Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Belfast as well as Amsterdam, Geneva and Zurich.

The plans came as critics pointed out that the much-lauded figure of a new runway bringing in economic benefits worth £147 billion, used in the Airport Commission’s final report, quietly fell to under half that, just £61 billion, in the Government’s announcement on expansion, published yesterday.

The Government’s report did not mention the huge difference in the two figures, but wrote that its “revised analysis” was based on “net present values” generated by subtracting the monetised costs from the monetised benefits.

Separately, commercial property values around the airport could be boosted by as much as £7.6 billion to £18 billion, according to agent Lambert Smith Hampton.