Heathrow welcomes Loganair as first new British airline in 28 years

Heathrow welcomes Loganair as first new British airline in 28 years

Heathrow airport has welcomed its first new British airline in nearly three decades because of the war in Ukraine. Loganair, Britain’s biggest regional airline, has been handed lucrative take-off and landing slots at Heathrow following sanctions against Russian flag carrier Aeroflot. It is the first British airline to begin flying from the airport since British Mediterranean in 1994. The allocation, made by a central coordinator, will come as a boon to millionaire Bond brothers that own Loganair, who have recently put the airline up for sale. Slots at Heathrow are highly sought-after. Once allocated, airlines can choose to sell or lease them to a third party. The highest price paid for a single pair of slots at the airport was $75m (£66m), when Oman Air acquired rights to a morning arrival in February 2016 from Air France-KLM. Aeroflot held 70 weekly slot pairs at Heathrow prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February. The state-owned airline was stripped of them as part of sanctions against Russia. Aeroflot is banned from landing at UK airports . Virgin Atlantic was among the other beneficiaries of Aeroflot’s slots being reallocated, the Evening Standard reported on Monday. The transatlantic airline brought forward plans