BRITISH Airways is planning growth at Manchester Airport through greater co-operation with Oneworld partners.
Next summer, schedules will be co-ordinated with American Airlines and Iberia to Spain. More joint flights are planned with Finnair and Qantas.
With American, BA wants to codeshare on its flights to New York JFK and on the US carrier’s services to Chicago.
However, UK-US bilaterals will need to be changed before the carriers begin joint flights.
BA and Iberia will codeshare to Madrid and Barcelona. Growth is also expected in co-operation with Finnair.
BA Regional commercial manager David Ranger said he was working with Finnair to feed passengers onto BA’s Scottish services to Manchester to connect on to Scandinavia flights, instead of through Heathrow.
Ranger said he was confident codeshare flights with LOTPolish Airlines will continue to Warsaw next summer. Apart from Oneworld growth, BA will build up its European network from Manchester next year.
New flights start to Nice and Lyons in March, with two more new services planned to as yet undisclosed destinations.
The airline’s Manchester fleet will be made up of Airbus A319 and A318s, and 50-seater Embraer 145s by 2005.
This will give more flexibility than the current Boeing 737s.