St. Louis has a direct link to London again for the first time in over two decades. British Airways launched four-times-a-week flights from Heathrow to St. Louis Lambert International using a Boeing 787-8, filling a gap that opened when American Airlines dropped its Gatwick service back in 2003. It's BA's 27th US destination — and a sign of something bigger happening in the American Midwest.

After 9/11, the US legacy airline sector consolidated hard. TWA, US Airways, Northwest, Continental and AirTran all vanished into what's now the Big Three — American, Delta and United. In the process, once-busy hubs like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Memphis and Cleveland were stripped of their hub status as traffic got funnelled into bigger, more efficient mega-hubs. Europe went the other way: nearly every country kept its flag carrier and capital-city hub, so the consolidation at group level (think IAG owning BA, Iberia and Aer Lingus) never killed off the individual gateways.

That divergence created an opening. The Big Three now serve Europe from only around 17 metro areas, while more than 56 US metros have over a million people. Travellers in between are pushed through hubs like Chicago, Atlanta or Newark — unless a European airline decides to fly direct. That's exactly what's happening. BA now flies to St. Louis and Cincinnati; Aer Lingus serves Pittsburgh and Cleveland from Dublin; Lufthansa runs five-times-a-week Frankfurt flights from St. Louis. For mid-sized Midwestern cities, European carriers are quietly providing the nonstop access that American ones took away.

New aircraft are making it possible. The Boeing 787-8 and Airbus A330neo burn 20-25% less fuel than the ageing 767s they replace and fly further, making 200-250 seat thin long-haul routes viable where they once weren't. BA's St. Louis Dreamliner carries 204 passengers across business, premium economy and economy.

For travellers, this is genuinely good news. If you live in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland or Cincinnati, you may no longer need a connecting flight just to cross the Atlantic — and if you're a UK visitor, Gateway Arch country, the Ohio river towns or Pittsburgh's revitalised waterfront are now one nonstop away from Heathrow. Expect more of these routes as BA and its European rivals keep spotting demand the US Big Three left behind.