The British government has placed the UAE on its ‘red list’ of countries with flight bans. The news comes after a new coronavirus variant was found to have spread there. Emirates had been operating a comparatively high service frequency on its routes to the UK until this point.
Following the ban on entry to the UK from Dubai, which comes into effect at 13:00 yesterday, Emirates is operating its last Britain-bound flights for the time being. Earlier this morning on Twitter, it announced that “passenger services between Dubai and all our UK points – Birmingham, Glasgow, London & Manchester – have been suspended until further notice.”
A statement on the carrier’s website further detailed the final UK flights that it would be operating today. These are as follows.
What World’s Largest Aircraft Graveyards?
- Dubai-London Heathrow – EK01 & EK07.
- Dubai-Glasgow – EK27.
- Dubai-Birmingham – EK39.
- London Heathrow – Dubai – EK02 & EK08.
- Glasgow-Dubai – EK28.
- Birmingham-Dubai – EK40.
Statistics from travel data provider OAG show that Dubai-London Heathrow was the world’s busiest international airline route this month. With 190,365 available seats on scheduled services, it outranked second-placed Cairo-Jeddah by over 35,000.
UK flag carrier British Airways does have a presence on the Heathrow-Dubai corridor. However, the vast majority of these seats will have been on Emirates flights. As such, the UAE flag carrier is likely to take a large financial hit from this ban. But how large, exactly? Let’s closer examine Emirates’ presence in the UK.
