Iraqi Airways is to resume flights to London from Baghdad and Sulaimaniyah from early next month after receiving approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to return to the London market for the first time since 1990. The carrier had planned to introduce flights in 2010 but its plan was thwarted due to a $1.2 billion lawsuit by Kuwait Airways. This was recently resolved overcoming the final hurdle in the resumption of flights.

The carrier, currently in the middle of a fleet renewal process, will initially offer two flights a week from Baghdad and a single weekly rotation from Sulaimaniyah from March 3, 2013. The frequency of services increases to six times weekly from June 15, 2013. All the flights will serve London Gatwick Airport in the UK capital and will make a technical stop in the Swedish city of Malmo for security reasons. The airline says it will use “newly purchased Airbus A330, A321 and A320 planes” on the routes.

In the 12 months until November 2012 an estimated 125,000 bi-directional O&D passengers travelled between the UK and Iraq. The largest traffic flows are between London Heathrow and Erbil (25.8 per cent), Baghdad (18.8 per cent) and Sulaimaniyah (9.7 per cent) although there are also notable flows from Manchester to Erbil (7.0 per cent) and Sulaimaniyah (5.5 per cent) and from Birmingham to Sulaimaniyah (4.6 per cent) and Erbil (4.4 per cent). With no direct air services, Turkish Airlines currently dominates this market with a 48.4 per cent share of the traffic during this 12 month period, ahead of Austrian Airlines with 12.2 per cent, Royal Jordanian with 12.0 per cent and Emirates Airline with 10.9 per cent.

In the table below we look at the growing demand for air services between Iraq and the UK. In the space of the last five years bi-directional O&D demand has grown thirty fold from 2,251 passengers in 2007 to 67,040 in 2011. In the first eleven months of 2012 an estimated 115,000 O&D bi-directional passengers travelled between the two countries, just over double the numbers for the same period in 2011.