ONE of America’s biggest airlines has stunned industry experts by securing enough Heathrow runway slots to start services there next April when a new open-skies regime will open up the airport.

Delta has gained access to Heathrow’s runways after negotiations with Air France and KLM, its European partner airlines, according to chief executive Gerald Grinstein.

This will be a blow to BA and Virgin. Before open skies, only they and two other airlines - American and United - could fly from Heathrow to the US. The two British carriers tried to stop open skies, but thought damage would be limited by the difficulty new entrants encounter in gaining access to Heathrow. Its runways are full, with take-off and landing slots the most highly prized in world aviation. Pairs have changed hands for £10m.

Analysts expect Delta to fly twice a day to New York, and once to Atlanta, its main hub.

Grinstein said: “We will have the slots available to us.” He did not specify whether Air France or KLM would provide them. But he noted that “the economics of flights from London to Charles de Gaulle [Paris’s main airport] have certainly changed since the opening of the Channel tunnel”.

KLM and Air France are likely to codeshare on the Delta flights, which means that, for the first time, airlines from the Continent will have their codes on a service from Heathrow to the US. Delta, Air France and KLM are all part of the “Skyteam” alliance, which competes with the Oneworld alliance led by British Airways.

Delta’s success in finding slots at Heathrow may cause analysts to reassess the impact of open skies on BA, which makes the lion’s share of its profits from its North Atlantic routes. Its New York-London flights are particularly important.

Other big US carriers are likely to follow Delta’s lead. Insiders suggest KLM, which operates some of the few remaining services into Heathrow with small tur-boprop aircraft, may provide slots to Northwest Airlines, while Aer Lingus yesterday confirmed it had received approaches about its Heathrow slot holding. It said, however, that it had no plans to change its operations there.

Andrew Lobbenberg of ABN Amro recently estimated that open skies could reduce the prof-itability of BA’s American services by 25%-53%.

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