JetBlue Will Fly to London Gatwick and Stansted

Updated 11/17/20: For JetBlue's 2021 launch of flights to London, the initial airports will be Gatwick and Stansted in late 2021, NOT London Heathrow. This is disappointing, since most passengers prefer to fly into London Heathrow, and the Stansted route in particular is unlikely to be successful.

JetBlue Will Fly to London Gatwick from New York JFK and London Stansted from Boston when it launches transatlantic service in 2021 from New York JFK and Boston BOS, after taking delivery of its new A321LR aircraft.

Previously, JetBlue announced that it would start flights to London in 2021, followed by Paris, Amsterdam and Dublin but didn't specify which London airport it would fly to. The unspoken assumption was that it would be London Gatwick, due to the extraordinary expense of slots at London Heathrow. For example, SAS sold a couple of Heathrow slots to American Airlines for $75 million in 2017.

More recently, at the outset of the pandemic earlier in 2020, Air New Zealand sold its one slot for $27 million. With the precipitous fall in many airlines' fortunes, JetBlue no doubt was hoping to obtain a better deal, but availability has been hamstrung by the reprieve given to airlines who, due to the pandemic, aren't operating their usual flights into and out of LHR. Usually if they failed to operate their flights they'd lose their slots. London Heathrow has loosened these restrictions given the global pandemic, so airlines haven't had to relinquish these coveted Heathrow slots.

The new JetBlue Mint for U.S.-Europe flights will be in an angled 1-1 configuration across 8 rows, with direct aisle access for each seat and the head of the bed by the window.