In 2009, British Airways launched one of the most distinctive routes in transatlantic travel. Its BA001/BA002 service connected London City Airport with New York JFK on the Airbus A318, nicknamed the “Baby Bus,” with just 48 all-business-class seats.
London City sits on the east side of the city, far closer to Canary Wharf and the financial district than Heathrow. Westbound, the plane stopped in Shannon, Ireland, where passengers cleared U.S. customs and continued to New York as domestic arrivals. The service debuted to considerable fanfare, and in 2010 BA added a second daily rotation.
The unraveling began quietly. By 2015, the twice-daily schedule had been cut to once. By 2020, COVID grounded it entirely, and British Airways never brought it back. The official explanation was falling demand, but the more telling question is why demand fell at all, given that the product itself hadn’t deteriorated. The answer lies less in aviation economics than in the psychology of corporate travel.
The travelers best served by the LCY route, senior executives, financiers, high-value business customers, weren’t the ones making the bookings. That fell to executive assistants, secretaries, and corporate travel agents. For them, booking LCY was a thankless risk: if the flight failed, blame was immediate; if it succeeded, recognition was absent.
The Tyranny of the Defensible Choice
Heathrow to JFK is one of the most heavily served transatlantic corridors in the world. British Airways alone runs multiple daily departures, with American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, and Delta adding plenty more. A cancellation means another flight within hours and a ready explanation. Nobody gets blamed for choosing Heathrow.
LCY offered none of that cover. Once it dropped to a single daily departure, a cancellation left the traveler stranded and the person who’d made the booking exposed. Picture the call from the departure lounge: “If you hadn’t put me in this rinky-dink airport, I’d be in New York by now.” That call doesn’t get made from Heathrow.
The product was superior for the traveler. But the traveler wasn’t the buyer. The buyer was a risk-averse intermediary whose interest lay not in optimizing the passenger’s experience but in making a choice that couldn’t be questioned if things went sideways. Heathrow was always the rational option, not because it was better, but because it was defensible. This is the essense of the principal-agent problem.
Idea for Impact: The story of the JFK-LCY flight is really the story of how decisions get made in offices. Choices are shaped not for the person traveling, but for the person who’ll have to justify them when things go wrong. Convenience gets sacrificed to conformity. The safest course is rarely the wisest, but it’s the one least likely to get you blamed.
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