As a frequent traveler and someone who frankly despises any form of inconvenience, airline flight routes matter to me a lot.

Gatwick is my airport of choice, for obvious reasons. The difference between getting to Gatwick and getting to Heathrow is the difference between a half-hour train journey and a two-hour bus journey. Then there’s the matter of the airports themselves: while Gatwick is compact and easy to deal with, Heathrow is a confusing, sprawling mess. Heathrow is not convenient in any respect, so I avoid it whenever I can, even if it means taking a less direct route to get to my final destination.

I distinctly recall my dismay when British Airways moved its Gatwick-Phoenix flight to Heathrow several years ago—a dismay rivaled only by that which I felt when it became impossible to fly from Gatwick to Cork on any airline other than Ryanair. And there was another blow yesterday when I found out that both British Airways and American Airlines are moving their respective Gatwick-Dallas flights to Heathrow as well.

Gatwick-Dallas is a route I often travel several times a year to see my family in Arizona. I can’t stand DFW (though Terminal D is pretty nice), but I’ve put up with it because it’s convenient leaving from Gatwick and then going from Dallas to Tucson.

If I’m going to have to go to Heathrow anyway now to catch a flight to Arizona, I guess I might as well take a direct Heathrow-Phoenix flight and avoid the hassle of Dallas. But here’s the rub; whereas Tucson is an hour and a half from my parents, Phoenix is three hours. So between the two hours to get to Heathrow from Brighton and the three hours to get from Phoenix to Sierra Vista, I’m faced with a total of five hours of extra traveling if I fly between Heathrow and Phoenix (not counting the time actually spent on the plane). Compare this to the two extra hours it takes if I go from Gatwick to Tucson, and you can see why I’m irritated.

All is not lost, of course. Continental still flies a Gatwick-Houston-Tucson route, and I reckon I can probably get to the east coast from Gatwick and catch something to Tucson from there. It just makes me nervous when airlines start pulling their flights from Gatwick, because it increases the likelihood that I will have to make the long haul to Heathrow a lot more often, and I hate that. I know that, in the greater scheme of things, this is a minor irritation. But air travel is miserable enough as it is; anything that compounds the misery just makes me miserable.

Further reading…