Member

Slots are very complicated; I am under no illusions about that. They are big money, particularly at certain times of the day, and some airlines own very large chunks of them. Because airlines are commercial businesses and have shareholders, shares can be bought and sold. A company that has access to a lot of slots, primarily at Heathrow, could be bought by an international company in the Middle East or the Far East, for instance, that says, “We’re interested, to a point, in flying to Inverness, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast or Manchester, but, on balance, we’ll keep some of those going and use some of the rest of them to service international routes, which we believe would be more profitable to us”.