Eastern Airways, the Humberside-based airline with a strong focus on the oil centres of the east coast of the UK, is to launch shuttle services between London City Airport and Amsterdam from next January. The airline will operate up to eight flights a day, including three in the morning peak and four in the evening peak.

The launch has been made possible with the release of four sets of slots at the two airports by Air France-KLM, which has had its acquisition of VLM waved through by the Office of Fair Trading without reference to the Competition Commission. Air France, KLM and VLM are strong at London City and the OFT required the group to hand over slots to a new airline to ensure there would still be competition on the popular route.

In approving Air France-KLM’s acquisition of VLM, the OFT said: “A key lesson from abroad is that an incumbent airline’s offer to make slots available does not guarantee that a competitor would take up the offer and enter onto the route - and so some past airline merger remedies failed to achieve their goal of restoring competition.”

Simon Pritchard, OFT’s senior director of mergers, said: “Our slot remedy would not have worked if no new entrant emerged to compete with KLM post-merger. We are now confident that Eastern Airways, with the necessary slots, will restore competition to pre-merger levels. This result protects those passengers who collectively spend over £50 million per year flying between London City and Amsterdam.”

Air France-KLM said of the announcement: “The clearance by the OFT opens the ways for a close cooperation between VLM Airlines and regional carrier CityJet, a 100% subsidiary of Air France, already operating out of London City Airport.”

The first Eastern flight is set to leave City at 0650, almost an hour earlier than the earliest KLM flight, and the last return from Schiphol would be at 2025, over an hour after the last KLM flight.