Yes in what might be seen as a slap in the face of the Credit crunch, airlines of Europe launched 152 new routes this week out of 200 world wide.  Whilst it is true that the first week of April is the start of the summer timetable, the number of routes in a tie of crisis is something of a surprise.  Remember these are new routes, not summer routes restarting from last year, which begs the question, have these guys read the paper recently?  Ryan air launches 67 of these routes, whilst this might not be that much of a surprise with aircraft coming back to the fleet after a winter lay off. 

So what can be said about these new route launches?  If you look at the details you can start to see some of the interesting information that will reveal that a lot of the routes are just chopped and changed, rather than really new.  The busiest new route starting this week is from Paris Orly and Barcelona with 35 flights a week with Click Air and 18 flights a week with Air France, replacing Iberia and easyJet, accounting for 2 out of the top 10 route launches this week. 

The other clear change shuffle is at Heathrow, with Lufthansa introducing new routes form Berlin Tegel switching from London City, and Milan Malpensa using slots vacated by BMI dropping routes to Durham Tees Valley,  Jersey and Leeds/Bradford.  In fact the Berlin route will operate using BMI aircraft, indicating how the airline alliance is developing.

Other changes include the reintroduction of the controversially dropped Shannon to Heathrow route by Aer Lingus, and Copenhagen is still re adding routes dropped with the collapse of Sterling, as other airlines take up the slack. 

The biggest growth market though is undoubtedly Italy, clearly a new focus for Ryan air and Lufthansa, with a total of 37 new airports getting new airlines or routes. 

Overall, can anything be read into this?  Probably not, the simple thing is that the Italian market is suffering with the restructuring of Alitalia resulting in routes being dropped, and other airlines smelling blood moving in.  This has resulted in the Italian market witnessing the most changes for this summer. 

Some things though never seem to change, the North South trend by the Low Cost airlines continues, with easyJet continuing to expand on longer routes across the med, and the East European and Scandinavian low costs focusing on bigger European cities in theUK, France and Germany.  

Route information from: http://www.anna.aero/