VIRGIN Atlantic has announced plans to fly between Scottish airports and London's Heathrow from next year.
The airline, owned by tycoon Sir Richard Branson, plans to provide shuttle services from Edinburgh and Aberdeen, but not Glasgow, opening up easier access to the UK capital and hundreds of other destinations.
Virgin would be going head to head with British Airways subsidiary bmi.
The move is in response to the takeover of bmi by Spanish firm International Airlines Group (IAG), the parent company of British Airways's (BA), which Virgin said will damage competition.
It has already appealed against the European Commission's decision to approve the takeover, but is now pressing ahead with its own plans to start up domestic flights.
Virgin Atlantic is taking its first steps into the domestic market and will start flights between London and Manchester from next spring, with links between Scotland and the capital set up in the following months.
However, the plans depend on a successful bid being made to take over slots on those routes at Heathrow that have been made available as a result of the IAG takeover.
Steve Ridgeway, Virgin Atlantic's chief executive, said: "It's important to keep Scotland connected to the rest of the world.
"Initially there will be three services a day out of Manchester. There will be flights in the key peak morning time, again at lunchtime and again in the evening, and we will look to ultimately replicate that sort of thing out of Scotland as well.
"But there is a process to go through between now and the end of the year to ensure that we are successful in obtaining those landing rights at Heathrow, so that we can start to offer a service out of Scotland from next summer."
Virgin and BA have long been rivals on the international front, and competition for passengers has turned acrimonious at times.
A spokeswoman for Virgin Atlantic said of the bmi take-over: "We believe the deal will cause serious competitive harm at Heathrow, placing British Airways in a position of total market dominance at the world's busiest airport, and completely eroding consumer choice.
"We will bid to operate all of the remedy slots that BA has been forced to give up through the process.
"We have made clear our commitment to operate on much of bmi's existing network throughout."
Business leaders said Virgin's announcement of Scottish routes showed Glasgow Airport is still suffering from bmi's withdrawal from the city in March.
Glasgow Chamber of Commerce chief executive Stuart Patrick said: "We are still seeing the consequences of the bmi withdrawal from Glasgow last March in terms of capacity and flights between Glasgow Airport and Heathrow.
"A substantial percentage of the Heathrow slots available to Glasgow before bmi withdrew have not yet been recovered. Frankly, it's galling that all the stops seem to be getting pulled out to help Aberdeen and Edinburgh, but not Glasgow."
l As many as 100,000 people have written to MPs to urge a review of the "too high" air passenger duty (APD) tax.
Fair Tax on Flying said 75 MPs had signed a parliamentary early day motion calling for more Treasury research into APD, which was increased by around 8% this year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article