I mean, there certainly is a class of travellers who are absolutely willing to pay extra for time, as proven by BA's direct London to New York flight, that is very unusual in that

1) it's serviced directly from London City airport, which is tiny, but also closest you can get to the city centre by air

2) because of how short that airport is, BA ordered special shortened Airbus A318 that is only made in a full business class configuration(only 32 seats) and it only ever flies on that one route. And even then it's actually too far for its range, so it makes a quick stop in Ireland to refuel before crossing the Atlantic first.

I'm reasonably certain that paying extra for this special flight saves you more than 90 minutes compared to taking a conventional one from Heathrow, no matter which class you'd travel.

> 2) because of how short that airport is, BA ordered special shortened Airbus A318 that is only made in a full business class configuration(only 32 seats) and it only ever flies on that one route. And even then it's actually too far for its range, so it makes a quick stop in Ireland to refuel before crossing the Atlantic first.

It's only too far for its range when flying from an airfield _with a runway the length of City_. From Heathrow it could do the flight non-stop: it just can't take off with so heavy from City.

I suppose it would raise a few eyebrows to take off from City and do its refueling stop 20 miles west in Heathrow.

Of course Heathrow is also far busier than Shannon and far more likely to have delays.

Heathrow also doesn't have US preclearance which it relies on to justify the longer flight time due to the stop. (And it would be an utter waste of a slot at Heathrow: why would you use up one of your slots at Heathrow for a refuelling stop when you could instead fly to an airport which isn't slot limited?)

Semi-interesting geeky aviation tidbit, those flights were also given the original Concorde LHR/JFK "BA001" flight number.

Oh that is very cool

While the stop in Ireland is unfortunate, they at least pre-clear US immigration there. Which is nice to avoid in NYC airports if you don’t have a trusted traveller bypass of some sort.

At least for international travel, luggage is supposed to be checked in one hour prior. I've actually had someone turn me away at 59 minutes because well frankly I think because he could and I wasn't flying business class, so my business or the loss thereof didn't matter. As we both know business and first class travelers have different rules applied or at least the rules relaxed to retain their revenue.

It's likely they'd already given away your seat.

Especially when they can get to the front of the check-in line, exit control line and security.

I never understood the skip-security and skip exit-control line: those are public services.

They're not public services, they're security theater with no real effectiveness. The skip programs are effectively official acknowledgement of that.

I agree they’re theatre, but letting 1st class queue-jump isn’t acknowledgement of that: they’re not skipping the checks themselves, just making the queue longer for everyone else.

Nothing stops a publicly or semi-publicly owned service to have premium tiers.

They don't offer the service for free.

Then they should sell it directly to the public.

The only issue with queue-jumping public disservice is that it discourages fixing the problem in the first place.

I think it's a little more complex than that:

* Some low-cost airlines (like EasyJet) are pretty much doing just that, their premium membership give you access to priority lanes without any other significant benefit (since they don't really offer any).

* I don't think anyone wants ticketing to get even more complicated. It's obviously a lot easier and more rewarding for airlines to treat their frequent/business flyers well and make everyone else take the slow lines.

* First and business classes don't fill up the planes, airlines are directly impacted by shitty airports that can't embark/disembark/transfer 80% of their passengers (and luggage) quickly enough. You can't say there's zero incentive to fix the problem.