With St. Louis set to fly nonstop to London beginning next year, I decided to take a look at some of the historic service from Lambert to the UK capital city. The British Airways flight will be the second time a British based airline serves St. Louis. British Calendonian was the first airline with St. Louis-London service when it began flying the route in 1980. That route ended in the mid 80's and Trans World Airlines (TWA) started up the same route. TWA continued service through 2001 when it was taken over by American Airlines. AA only ran it until 2003 when they shut down the route and St. Louisians have had to connect elsewhere to reach London ever since.

There is data from the BTS's T-100 datasets on the route beginning in 1990 when it was served by TWA. TWA used a combination of the 767 and 747 on the route over the years. The 747 had roughly 430 seats available while the 767 was a comparatively meager 190. From 1990 to 1996, the route was flown once daily, but the amount of available seats varied quite a bit depending on which aircraft was most often used. In 1992 for example, they almost exclusively flew the 747 and therefore had 150k annual seats available (one-way) vs 1990 when only the 767 was flown and only 66k annual seats were available. See the chart below for the amount of seats (departing STL) available in each year by aircraft type. The TWA/AA route flew into London-Gatwick airport south of the city rather than London-Heathrow which is the busiest airport in London.

In 1993, TWA started using the 747 only in the summer months. Then in 1997, they stopped using the 747 and instead flew the 767 year round, but increased flights to twice daily on during the summer months. The combined aircraft and frequency shifts kept the total available seats at around 100k annually. They flew roughly 500 total departures in 1997 and 1998 which coincided with some of the best load factors for the flight. Despite the better loads, TWA shortened the summer season with twice daily departures and in 2000 scaled back to once daily year round. It stayed daily until AA (after taking over the route) moved it to roughly 4xweek in Nov. 2022. It returned for a final hurrah of daily runs in the summer of 2003 before ceasing operation at the end of October.

With respect to Load Factor (how full the flight were on average), the route fared better than I expected. In the summer months, even on the 747, the route was routinely over 80% full (departing flights) and even had some months over 90%. From 1990 up to 1996, the yearly load factors hovered around the low 70%'s (high of 78% in '91 and low of 68% in '94). But after switching to only use the 767 in 1997 and increasing frequency, the load factor actually increased up to 83% and stayed around 80% for the next several years. Take a look at the chart below to see monthly and annual load factors for the STL-LGW route. Comparing some other US service to London-Gatwick (LGW) from the same time, the TWA load factors performed well. British Airways flew once daily between New York-JFK and LGW through the 90's and had several years with annual load factors in the 50%'s. The service did start performing better in 1998 when load factors matched TWA's at around 80%. Continental served LGW from its Newark EWR hub with sometimes once and sometimes twice daily service in the 90's. The annual load factors were regularly in the mid to high 70%'s with only two years between 1991-2000 getting just above 80% for the annual number.

TWA had another regular flight from St. Louis to Europe in the 90's. They flew STL to Paris (CDG) with daily, but mostly seasonal service. Load factors on STL-CDG were similar to LGW in 1990, 1991, and 1992, but from '93-'00 the CDG route was routinely 5 to 10 percentage points below the LGW route. While high load factors do not necessarily mean a profitable route, it is generally a good indicator of performance to have well filled flights. By all accounts the historic STL-LGW service performed well through most of its life. The route did especially well towards the end of TWA's life and only started to fall off after the switch to American Airlines and the reduction of hub service to Lambert which likely helped to feed the route some. I don't have a great idea of how much of the route was serving St. Louisians directly verses connecting traffic at Lambert Airport, but I would assume the local demand for visiting London and beyond has grown over the past 25 years and I expect the new service will perform well. Even with summertime capacity to Europe from STL set to triple next summer (with Lufthansa increasing frequency from 3x to 5x per week to go along with the 4x BA service), total flights from STL to Europe will still be lower than in the late 1990's. So while it may seem like a big jump compared only a few years ago when there were no direct flights to Europe, these two routes may be able to coexist without too much trouble filling seats.

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All data for this post was sources from T-100 datatsets available via the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.