More significantly, the highly successful UAE-based low-cost carrier Air Arabia has announced that by the end of 2009 it will be launching a new airline, Air Arabia Egypt, to link several Egyptian airports with destinations in the Gulf, North Africa, Europe and the UK.

The Israel example shows the power of what the airline industry calls VFR – ‘visiting friends and relatives’. Despite the political problems, tourism to Israel has always remained buoyant, fed by special-interest religious tours in particular – but fuelled above all by VFR, especially from areas with a high Jewish population. In the UK that means, firstly, north London: even before easyJet’s launch, El Al is the only full-service national flag carrier able to maintain regular near-daily scheduled service out of Luton (and, previously, out of Stansted), in addition to its twice-daily Heathrow service. Another key VFR origin is Manchester, from where jet2 launched nonstop Tel Aviv flights in January 2009 – shortly afterwards announcing that it was doubling its peak service.

VFR out of the UK to most other Middle Eastern destinations isn’t as strong – there just aren’t that many expat Jordanians and Syrians in Britain. Air Arabia, though, has already proved that VFR works: in April 2009 it launched Air Arabia Maroc, a low-cost carrier which today links Casablanca with a clutch of francophone cities in western Europe (alongside London, Milan and elsewhere).

Its new venture, Air Arabia Egypt, on the other hand, is squarely targeting the leisure market, with multiple bases in Egypt serving different markets: Cairo and Alexandria will no doubt benefit from expanded links to Africa and the Gulf (where the large numbers of Egyptian expats brings VFR into play again), while Luxor, Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada will likely attract service chiefly from northern and western Europe. The three Air Arabias will also, no doubt, link up, making it possible to fly in a series of hops from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, low-cost all the way.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary

The new venture also kick-starts a fascinating contest. easyJet, a pioneer of low-cost travel in Europe, already serves Egyptian holiday airports such as Sharm and Hurghada from the UK. It will, it seems, soon have to compete with Air Arabia, a pioneer of low-cost travel in the Middle East. Two highly successful carriers from different parts of the globe are about to meet head-to-head. Be sure that Ryanair will be watching closely.

Beside all of this, the Gulf (although aided by market protection) is able to support six more low-cost carriers – Sama, Nas, Felix, Bahrain Air, FlyDubai and Jazeera. The last of these has announced that it is searching for a new regional hub. Will it be Beirut? Istanbul? Perhaps Athens?

As Middle East airlines start reaching out towards Europe, expect an ever-intensifying clash of low-cost cultures in the months ahead.

On arrival, the immigration area was jampacked and heaving with people: later, I counted 18 flights on the screens at baggage reclaim as having arrived in quick succession at Terminal 3, almost all of them long-haul (Singapore, Delhi, Muscat, Bangkok, Dubai, etc). Even the queue for EU passport-holders stretched out of the door. I sidled over to the Fast Track lane, showed my card, and joined the shortish queue.

25 minutes later I was still standing in line. Meanwhile, the entire queue of non-Fast Tracked EU passport-holders had been processed, and the hall was three-quarters empty.

You see, this was not Fast Track for EU passport-holders. Anybody and everybody who’d flown business class on the previous 18 flights was in that queue. So the two officials posted to Fast Track were having to do complete security checks on some people, with detailed questioning and referrals, before they could issue visas, as happens at the ‘Other Nationalities’ zone. Except that Other Nationalities has about 10 or 15 desks staffed, whereas Fast Track has only two.

I don’t even know who to blame: is it BAA’s fault, or the UK Border Agency, or the airlines?

Fast Track at a British airport is a relatively simple concept to grasp: obviously, it should be for EU passport-holders only. Whoever is to blame, next time I’m opting for the ordinary line.

Michael O’Leary is not someone to let an inconvenient truth obstruct a higher public relations mission. The “unacceptable face of capitalism”, as Mr O’Leary’s Irish critics have dubbed Ryanair’s chief executive, has launched a salvo against airport fees in the UK generally and BAA in particular, which owns Stansted, Ryanair’s UK base. Because they are high, Mr O’Leary is slashing winter flights and moving jets elsewhere.

This is disingenuous. Ryanair, like all airlines, is cutting winter capacity. Furthermore, Stansted has never charged airlines as much as its regulators allow. Last year, the fee cap was set at £6.44. Stansted charged £5.50. This gap is a consequence of the bargaining power of its main users, Ryanair and EasyJet, and the competition it faces from other European airports.

Unlike long-haul carriers, which need to maintain feeder routes into their hubs, low-cost carriers run a series of point-to-point businesses. Aircraft are therefore mobile assets that can be parked wherever and whenever it is cheapest or most profitable to do so. Ryanair is only responding to market forces. When summer demand returns, so will the aircraft. As for UK passenger taxes, these are set to rise by 10 per cent to £11 per passenger in November, which Mr O’Leary says damages “London and UK tourism and the British economy generally”. It is true that UK duties are a European anomaly. Yet the marginal effect of that increase on a holiday’s total cost is minuscule.

The 9 per cent depreciation of sterling against the euro over the past 12 months has had a far greater impact – and may even encourage more holidaymakers to visit Britain on Ryanair than it has stopped others travelling to Europe. Mr O’Leary wants to have his cake and be applauded for eating it too.

There’s a lot of bad in BAA, for sure, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of good in Ryanair: O’Leary’s PR juggernaut, despite claiming to stand up for the rights of the passenger, ends up most of the time crushing any nuanced understanding of the issues.

We’d all be better served if Ryanair invested just a little bit more in customer service, if BAA stopped turning our airports into shopping malls – and if taxes on flying were charged, not on a flat rate per person, but on a sliding scale depending on how much floor-space that person’s seat occupied inside the aircraft. Small seat in 737: low tax. Flat bed in personal suite onboard A380: high tax. As well as being fair, it might just shut Michael O’Leary up for a while. Anyone got any better ideas?