Which UK airport has the most new routes this summer?

Doncaster Sheffield airport wins few prizes. It is a big shed planted at the former RAF station at Finningley in South Yorkshire, and is much handier for Doncaster (three miles) than Sheffield (20 miles, via Doncaster). But this summer, “DSA” has gained more international routes than any other airport in Britain.

At the start of the busiest summer ever for outbound aviation from the UK, I asked the airline routes expert, Ralph Anker, to calculate the winners and losers among Britain’s airports – using Cirium data and analytics to compare a peak week in August 2019 with the same week last summer.

“Doncaster Sheffield has a net gain of 12 destinations with new routes to eastern Europe, north Africa and Turkey,” says the author of The Anker Report (whose name conveniently stands for Airline Network Knowledge Expertise and Research).

The South Yorkshire airport is starting to mirror Luton as a key gateway to eastern Europe. Thirty years ago, when the Iron Curtain divided the continent, military planes had the then-Soviet cities of Riga in Latvia and Vilnius in Lithuania in their sights. Today, the Airbus jets of Wizz Air are carrying hundreds of passengers in peace to those capitals and many others.

Gatwick has added seven routes to become the only UK airport to achieve a double century of destinations; two very different coastal cities, Rio and Zadar, and former conflict zones of Sarajevo and Sulaymaniyah, help lift the Sussex airport’s total to 202.

Among Britain’s top 10 airports, Manchester, Luton and Edinburgh have each added five routes. But Edinburgh’s gain is Glasgow’s loss: the airport serving Scotland’s biggest city has shed 14 destinations, after Ryanair shifted flights to the nation’s capital. Stansted’s relentless resurgence appears to be on pause: the Essex airport’s departure screens are showing eight fewer destinations.

Compared with summer 2018, Birmingham loses five routes, while Bristol and Newcastle are down four each.

The route count does not correlate to the number of passengers: Heathrow has “only” 194 routes this summer, eight fewer than rival Gatwick, but with big planes and high frequencies it achieves a rate of 335,000 passengers per non-stop international destination, compared with 203,000 for Gatwick.

For travellers, places matter more than numbers. I won’t count Brunei, not because of the sultanate’s shocking attitude to LGBT+ people, but because it has been a destination from Heathrow for decades. All that has happened is that Royal Brunei’s en route stop in Dubai has been dropped. Nor does Murcia’s or Istanbul’s new airports make the cut.

But to Indonesia, beautiful Bali has displaced Jakarta. Africa gains a new link from Heathrow in the shape of Durban, while another British Airways addition is Charleston in South Carolina. But it is a bad year for other “secondary” airports in the US: New York Stewart, Oakland near San Francisco and Boston’s alternative gateway, Providence, have all been dropped by Norwegian.

Africa and Asia have increased routes from the UK while those to Europe and the Americas have diminished.

Overall, British passengers can fly to almost 400 destinations across the globe non-stop from a UK airport this summer. The number of international routes this summer added up across all UK airports is just eight more than last summer: 1,831 versus 1,823.

The author of The Anker Report calculates the number of seats on outbound aircraft from the UK will rise by about 2.6 per cent this year compared with last – mainly achieved with bigger and/or more frequent planes rather than new routes.

Concern about the environmental impact of aviation has yet to translate into action – unlike in Sweden, where the implementation of a new aviation tax last year has resulted in Swedish airports seeing 6 per cent fewer passengers in March this year than they did in the same month in 2018.