An ambitious and welcome plan for flights from Northern Ireland to the US

A low fare airline Fly Atlantic has announced a planned service to the United States.

The new route will fill the gap in the market of no direct flights currently operating between Belfast to North America.

Fly Atlantic is planning to start operating flights to Europe as well as North America from summer 2024.

Once fully operational, the airline said it intends to operate to 35 destinations from Belfast, and will create 21,000 new jobs by 2030.

Flights will start to go on sale from the beginning of 2024.

This sounds like a grand plan, involving six aircraft based at Aldergrove.

Fly Atlantic described it as a "game changer".

There are few details. It is not clear which city in America the planes will fly to, but New York is the most likely.

Very few airlines have been able to make a route between NI and the US work.

There were in fact relatively few routes between even the much bigger hub of Dublin and America until the early years of this century. But gradually the Republic found the numbers to expand its routes to the US, and even began to have direct flights all the way to California on the west coast.

These were stopped during Covid but are returning.

NI is a much smaller market than the south, but even so it is feasible to have direct transatlantic flights in a time of growing air traffic.

This is an ambitious plan but one that reminds us of the opportunities to be had in a time when economies begin to power forward in the aftermath of lockdowns.

Let us hope that with immense global financial challenges just now, the service does come to fruition.

The United States remains by a distance the richest country on earth and NI has links to it that long pre-date even the creation of our small country. Direct flights would be most welcome.