Image: British Airways
After more than 600 days of stopping flights between Britain and the United States, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic Airways today operate their first transatlantic flights to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Where British Airways operates flight number BA001, which was intended for flights of the famous Concorde plane, and Virgin Atlantic Airways operates flight number VS3 with an Airbus A350. The two flights take off simultaneously from two runways at Heathrow Airport at 8:30 am local time, today, Monday, November 8.
And transatlantic flights to the United States were stopped on March 16, 2020, due to the outbreak of the Corona virus and its transformation into a global epidemic. This stoppage seriously damaged Virgin Atlantic, as its main routes are to US transatlantic airports. And Shay Weiss, CEO of Virgin Atlantic, had expressed the importance of the Atlantic flights by saying that "Virgin without Atlantic is nothing."
Virgin Atlantic reservations increased by 91% after the White House announced plans to allow fortified travelers from other countries to enter the United States starting November 8, 2021.
The US is the UK's largest trading partner, and aviation contributes £23 million a day to the UK economy. In 2019, 22 million people traveled between the two countries, along with 900,000 tons of cargo.