Two transatlantic route launches bookend this week in US aviation. On Sunday April 19, British Airways operates its first nonstop flight between London Heathrow and St. Louis Lambert International Airport in 22 years. Nine days later, on April 28, Alaska Airlines becomes a transatlantic carrier for the first time in its history with a Seattle to Rome service on the Boeing 787-9. The two routes could not be more different in strategy, and both say something specific about where the transatlantic market is heading.

The St. Louis gap nobody fixed

British Airways flight BA221 departs London Heathrow at 4:25 PM and arrives in St. Louis at 7:30 PM, four times per week on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays through October. The return BA220 leaves St. Louis at 9:35 PM and lands at Heathrow at 11:35 AM the following day. The aircraft is a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner with all three BA cabins, World Traveller, World Traveller Plus, and Club World business class.

What makes this consequential is the gap it closes. The last nonstop between St. Louis and the United Kingdom was an American Airlines service to London Gatwick that ended in October 2003. That American route was itself inherited from TWA, which had built St. Louis into its international hub before the 2001 acquisition ended in failure. British Caledonian originally started the St. Louis-London service in 1980. TWA took over in the mid-1980s. American inherited it in 2001. American killed it two years later.

For 22 years, St. Louis has been one of the largest American metros without a UK nonstop. The city has a metropolitan population over 2.8 million and ranks as the twenty-first-largest metro area in the United States. Its European service in those 22 years has been essentially nothing: Wow Air briefly flew to Reykjavik in 2018 before the Icelandic low-cost carrier collapsed, and Lufthansa launched Frankfurt service in June 2022, which has continued. That is the complete list.

The question is why a foreign carrier is filling the gap rather than an American one. The easy answer is municipal incentives. Many US airports offer marketing support and fee waivers to attract new international service, and St. Louis has been especially aggressive. The harder answer is that American Airlines looked at the same market American ran in 2003 and decided it was not worth keeping. BA now sees something American did not, or the demand structure has changed enough in 22 years that the economics work for a foreign carrier even when they did not for a domestic one.

The 787-8 is the right aircraft for this kind of speculative route. It carries fewer passengers than a 777 or A350, which reduces the break-even load factor, and its range easily covers the 4,300-mile distance with spare capacity for weight and weather. If the route underperforms, BA can end it cleanly without having committed an A350 to the market.

Alaska crosses an ocean

Alaska Airlines flight AS100 departs Seattle at 2:45 PM on April 28 and arrives in Rome Fiumicino at 11:00 AM the next day. The return AS101 leaves Rome in the early afternoon and arrives in Seattle the same evening. The aircraft is a Boeing 787-9, configured with Alaska's post-Hawaiian-merger widebody product that inherits from the Hawaiian Airlines long-haul cabin.

This is Alaska's first transatlantic route ever. The airline was a narrowbody-only domestic and near-international carrier for most of its history, with Mexico, Canada, and Central America as its typical international scope. The 2024 merger with Hawaiian Airlines changed the fleet. Alaska now operates Hawaiian's legacy A330 fleet and the newer 787-9 Dreamliners that Hawaiian began receiving in 2024. Seattle to Rome is the kind of route those aircraft were built for.

Delta Air Lines, which also operates from Seattle, announced matching Seattle to Rome and Seattle to Barcelona services before Alaska's launch even occurred. The speed of the Delta counter-announcement tells you how competitive the Pacific Northwest to Mediterranean market is expected to be. Both carriers are betting that Seattle's tech-industry business traveler base combined with tourism demand can support multiple daily frequencies to leisure-oriented southern European cities.

The commercial strategy here is different from BA's St. Louis move. BA is filling a gap with a small aircraft on a route nobody else wants. Alaska is entering a market that Delta considers strategically important enough to defend, on a larger aircraft, with an announced intent to build a real transatlantic presence rather than a one-route experiment. The 787-9 has the range to eventually reach most of Europe from Seattle, and Alaska has been hinting at a broader transatlantic expansion.

What these launches say

The transatlantic market in 2026 is more fragmented than it has been in decades, and both of these route launches reflect that fragmentation. Legacy carriers are thinning their second-tier US-Europe flying because the economics have never been better for joint-venture mainline routes and never worse for peripheral city pairs. That leaves gaps, and the gaps get filled by foreign flag carriers with the right aircraft and the right cost structure to make them work.

St. Louis gets BA because BA has a 787-8 to spare and wants more US gateway cities. Seattle gets Alaska because Alaska now has a widebody fleet through the Hawaiian merger and because Seattle's tech-industry passenger base is the kind of high-yield traffic that Delta and Alaska will both fight to capture. Neither route existed a year ago, and both exist now because the aircraft economics, the merger consequences, and the airport incentives aligned in the same season.

St. Louis passengers who have been flying BA or Virgin Atlantic through Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, or Charlotte for 22 years can now fly direct. Seattle tech workers heading to Rome no longer need to connect through Frankfurt, Paris, or New York. The practical result for passengers is that the market is quietly expanding into smaller cities that used to require connections.

Whether both routes survive is a different question. A four-times-weekly seasonal service can be ended as quickly as it was added. Alaska's Rome route is a statement of intent, but the airline has not yet proved that it can operate long-haul flying profitably. The next year of performance data will determine whether these routes are a real expansion or a pair of opportunistic launches that get quietly retired in 2027.

For now, St. Louis becomes a UK-connected city again for the first time since 2003, and Alaska Airlines becomes a transatlantic carrier. Both firsts matter, and both will be watched closely by the industry to see whether they are anomalies or signals of a deeper shift.