Open Skies
The Open Skies agreement that the EU negotiated with the US to replace the old agreements that individual EU states had with the US came into force today.
The effects at the moment is basically that lots of US airlines will start flying into London Heathrow (which they weren’t allowed to before), while Air France will fly across the Atlantic from Heathrow and British Airlines will do the same from Paris and Brussels.
However, many more changes are possible. For instance, Ryanair are planning to open an Atlantic operation, presumably flying from small European airports to small American ones.
I do wonder whether this long-term will be the demise of the big hub airports, given that we’re likely to get many more point-to-point connexions.