Air New Zealand wants to resume flights to London
Recently, Air New Zealand requested daily aircraft slots at London Heathrow Airport however this request was denied. Although, the airline did receive daily slots at nearby London Gatwick Airport for use as early as July 2025.
An Air New Zealand Boeing 787-9 landing overhead at sunrise | Photo by: Noah Stohr-Waldren
Although Air New Zealand has received the aircraft slots at London Gatwick (LGW), it’s worth noting that this doesn't mean that the airline will follow through and begin a service to London from New Zealand. However, it’s clear that the airline is seriously considering the flight. After all, there’s little point in gaining aircraft slots at an airport that an airline has no intention of flying to.
In 2020, the airline sold its aircraft slots at London Heathrow (LHR) for over $42 million NZD. Now, despite gaining slots at LGW, the most understandable path for Air New Zealand to reenter the London market would be to purchase an existing slot at LHR from another airline. However, this would absolutely come at a very high cost due to the high demand for slots at Europe’s busiest airport.
Like many airlines across the world, Air New Zealand is facing a large aircraft shortage due to issues surrounding the delay of Boeing 787 deliveries and engine issues across their fleet of Boeing Dreamliners and Airbus A320/21 NEO jets. This could cause complications for Air NZ when trying to find aircraft to operate the long-range route. However, the airline is set to finally begin receiving its next-generation 787-9 Dreamliners from next year.
A Dreamliner arriving at Auckland Airport | Photo by: Noah Stohr-Waldren
Due to the very long distance of a New Zealand—London route (a whopping 18,354km) and current aircraft limitations, no aircraft can fly this route nonstop, so the flight would require a stopover. However, it is unclear where this stopover point could be. There have been rumours of an AKL-YVR-LGW route but this has not been confirmed.
Previously, Air New Zealand operated flights to London with a stopover in Los Angeles (1982-2020) and Hong Kong (2006-2013); however, these flights ended due to extremely low demand.
In 2019 after announcing the airline would suspend flights to the UK, Air New Zealand's Acting CEO Jeff McDowall said "Today Kiwis have more than twice the number of ways to fly to London than a decade ago and preferences have changed." "Less than 7% of all airline travellers between Auckland and London chose to fly with Air New Zealand via Los Angeles last year,” a service that is simply not sustainable.
However, since 2019 Air New Zealand has made multiple new upgrades to their offering including a brand new cabin refit to their Boeing 787-9 Aircraft which could lead more passengers to fly on NZ’s national carrier.
Unfortunately, it does seem unlikely for Air New Zealand to restart such a route due to the countless other airlines of higher merit, that operate single-stop services from New Zealand to the United Kingdom paired with the airlines major aircraft shortage.