Cancelled routes

annex

A friend was trying to book a christmas flight to Dusseldorf with Aer Lingus and there seems to be no flights, this is the message that comes up "Aer Lingus operates from Mar 28 2004 - Oct 24 2009"
I looked at other flights and the same goes for Glasgow International, Edinburgh, Helsinki and a couple other EU destinations while a lot of other EU destinations that had regular year long flights are now seasonal.
I looked at Ryanair to Glasgow Prestwick in December and that service doesn't seem to be running, the flybe service from Belfast City to Glasgow International is also not running in December.

Does anybody know what the deal with this is?
Are these routes finished?

Tenger

Its because EI don't confirm their schedule until closer to the time. Can't see them stopping DUS flights. Its a good route. They are looking at changes to the winter schedule so no flites bookable yet I assume

BuffyBot

Helsinki was seasonal last year/same this year.

The rest is proabably schedule changes that haven't been confirmed etc.

Airline schedules are divided into Summer and Winter, using the change of clocks to/from IST as the date of change. The winter schedule will be decided at the end of August

See here (it's not Ireland but the same rules apply and this is the simplest explanation I've seen) http://www.slotcoordination.nl/allocation_process.asp

Even year round routes are subject to this regime, although the airline has rights over the slot

annex

Thanks guys.
I've been using Aer Lingus several times a year for the last few years and I never seen the Dusseldorf/Scotland routes down like that so I thought they were making cut backs.

Things seem to be getting back to normal now so panic over