It’s hard to believe that it was less than two years ago that the DUP and Sinn Féin were sitting harmoniously in Government together, working hand-in-glove with each other to tell the world that there were “no gimmicks. No grandstanding. Just ministers getting on with their work.” What a difference two years can make.

It’s also hard to believe that it’s two years since the last time the operator of a direct transatlantic flight from Belfast was pulling the plug on the route. Perhaps things haven’t changed that much after all. This week Norwegian Air did the same, back then it was United Airlines.

What is common in both cases, however, is the chorus of voices declaring what a loss this is to Northern Ireland and how important a direct transatlantic link is for investment in Northern Ireland’s economy.

Back in 2016, the then Economy Minister Simon Hamilton, backed by the First and deputy First Ministers (working together of course, no gimmicks), used the route’s importance to investment in Northern Ireland as an excuse to try and give United Airlines £9m to keep the route open.

At the time, Minister Hamilton was asked at least three times by Steven Agnew MLA to outline the business case behind the bailout decision. He was given ample opportunity to present his evidence that a direct transatlantic flight from Belfast had a demonstrable effect on Northern Ireland’s economy or the levels of foreign direct investment in the region. On each occasion, the best he could manage was to point out the number of passengers on the flights over the preceding decade.

Keen to give the Department another opportunity to outline this evidence, I submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request requesting the ministerial briefings associated with Mr Agnew’s questions. The Department withheld this information, citing the need to “protect the private thinking space” for ministerial decision-making. This despite similar requests for briefings associated with other Assembly questions often being released through FoI.

Perhaps this evidence is out there somewhere, and if it does I’d love someone to direct me to it and prove me wrong. Call me cynical, but I’m beginning to think enough opportunities to present the evidence have come and gone that maybe it doesn’t exist. Perhaps there is massive economic benefit from having a direct flight from Belfast to the United States, but without any evidence there’s no justification for using public money to prop one up.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the existence of a direct flight and I used Norwegian Air to go on a great holiday to New York last year. But at the same time, maybe it’s okay to accept that this route has been a bit of a vanity project.

Maybe Northern Ireland doesn’t need a direct transatlantic flight. After all, we’re less than 100 miles from Dublin Airport which, when you consider the flight to New York itself is 3,100 miles, doesn’t seem that big. Add into that the time savings you can get from pre-clearance at Dublin, overall it begins to look like a better offer than Belfast International anyway.

Using a list of all the “budget” flight routes between Western Europe and the United States and published data on passenger numbers from 2017 (for Europe and the United States), we can get a rough estimate of the potential relative demand for a particular air route by totalling the passenger numbers at the two airports it’s connecting.

Doing this analysis suggests that Belfast’s transatlantic flights to Boston and New York have the 76th and 78th highest potential, respectively. Unfortunately, that’s out of a total of only 81 routes across Western Europe. In fact, the only routes that score lower in this rough metric are Norwegian Air’s flights from Cork and Shannon.

A comparison to the other “budget” routes from only the UK and Ireland can be seen in the chart below. It doesn’t make good reading for Belfast (highlighted in green). If you are an airliner wanting to connect these markets to the USA, Belfast – at a fraction the potential size of your routes from Gatwick and five times smaller than the routes from Dublin, for example – is an unappealing prospect.

Perhaps it’s time to accept that the future of transatlantic flight from Ireland lies in Dublin. Rather than endure inevitable disappointment every few years when the latest company has withdrawn from Belfast, we can instead focus our resources and energy on attracting investment to Northern Ireland in other, more demonstrably effective ways, rather than relying on a plane delivering a silver bullet.

 

Combined number of passengers between US/UK & Ireland airports on budget routes (Belfast routes highlighted in green).