EasyJet to buy Gatwick slots from Flybe EasyJet is seeking to strengthen its grip on Gatwick by agreeing to pay £20m for take-off and landing slots at the UK's second largest airport that are held by Flybe. EasyJet has overtaken British Airways to become the biggest airline at Gatwick, with an estimated 40 per cent market share, and these slots should enable the airline to defend itself against encroachment by the UK flag carrier, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Ryanair. Europe's second largest low-cost carrier by revenue, which joined the FTSE 100 in March, plans to use some of the Flybe slots from the summer of 2014 to provide additional flights on its most popular routes out of Gatwick, which include Alicante, Faro and Malaga. The proposed Flybe slot transaction - announced on Thursday - is consistent with plans by Carolyn McCall, easyJet's chief executive, to focus some of the airline's expansion on major airports with limited capacity. The company is considering placing a large aircraft order soon and Ms McCall said last week that easyJet could grow at its top 20 airports at the expense of European flag carriers and other airlines that do not have a low-cost business model. James Hollins, analyst at Investec, said: "This [proposed slot transaction] will ... enhance easyJet's [market] share dominance at Gatwick." Although Gatwick - in contrast to Heathrow - is not operating at full capacity, the UK's second largest airport does have operational bottlenecks, mainly in the morning. EasyJet should therefore benefit from how eight of the 25 pairs of take-off and landing slots it is planning to buy from Flybe are for early morning flights. Flybe, the lossmaking UK regional airline that has issued several profit warnings since its 2010 flotation, is pulling out of Gatwick next April and said it would reinvest some of the £20m of proceeds from the slot sale in its remaining 159 routes. The deal must be approved by Flybe's shareholders, but management decided to sell these Gatwick slots after the Civil Aviation Authority, the main aviation regulator, in January rejected the airline's complaint about how the airport restructured its aeronautical charges paid by carriers. From 2011, Gatwick's summer charges increased by 63 per cent, while winter fees were reduced to zero. Flybe had complained to the CAA that the changes unreasonably discriminated against it and other operators of small aircraft at Gatwick. Jim French, Flybe's chief executive, said the company could not bear Gatwick's "punitive rises" in aeronautical charges, particularly when the carrier also had to contend with the government's air passenger duty. On Thursday, Flybe announced further details of its effort to return its UK business to profit, saying that a planned target of £25m of annual cost savings in 2013-14 had now been increased to £30m. It added the airline had so far cut its workforce by 22 per cent to 2,140 and that further headcount reductions would now be sought. The sale of the Gatwick slots, plus other measures, are supposed to finance the turnround plan, including redundancies.