FREDDIE Laker , are you there? OK, I know you died just over a year ago but I wish you could have lived a little longer to hear yesterday's news that Ryanair has plans to start a seven pound one-way trans-Atlantic flight service to Baltimore and New York (New York, like Kennedy, or New York State?).
Seven pounds! Well, that will be for the early-booking birds, I suppose, but if it rises ten-fold for latecomers it will still be a bargain even after taxes are taken into account. Your pioneering Skytrain service in the late 1970s cost thirty-three pounds while BOAC and the American airlines were charging three or four times that amount. Your low-cost idea was probably before its time and you paid the price for that when the governments on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to make life difficult for you. You'll probably think it ironic that now the governments of the European Union are working with the United States on an Open Skies' policy that is already paying dividends only a few weeks after it was signed.
There are other signs that the Open Skies agreement is going to energise the airline business. Iberia is reported to be hoping that BA will move before other carriers to consolidate its existing stake of 10 per cent in the Spanish airline. Existing co-operation between the two national airlines is said to be mutually beneficial' at the airports they share, Heathrow, Barcelona and Madrid.
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