Somewhere in the Heathrow slot coordination machinery, a spreadsheet already shows which routes are being quietly hollowed out to make room for British Airways' five new long-haul destinations. **The press release calls this expansion. The slot ledger calls it displacement.** Heathrow operates at essentially 100% of its 480,000 annual slot movement cap. That ceiling is structural, not cyclical. BA cannot conjure new slots from thin air — every new long-haul rotation requires two slots, one departure and one arrival, sourced from existing grandfather rights, seasonal reallocation, or trades with other carriers. The airport doesn't grow. The pie gets recut. The fleet math compounds this. BA's long-haul operation runs on 787-8s, 787-9s, A350-1000s, and 777-300ERs — frames with meaningfully different seat counts and range envelopes. Adding a new destination doesn't just consume slots; it pulls an aircraft type from somewhere else in the network. A 787-9 redeployed to a new route is a 787-9 no longer flying its current one, or flying it with reduced frequency. **BA's 747 retirement since 2020 is the hidden variable here.** Those departures freed slots but stripped out the high-density capacity that made thinner long-haul routes viable on unit economics. Without the Jumbo's seat count to dilute fixed costs, some routes simply stopped making sense at the same gauge. That's not a crisis — it's a quiet editorial decision about which destinations BA has decided the network no longer needs to defend. Five new routes is not a story about where BA is going. It's a story about what BA has decided it can afford to stop protecting. Every new destination on the departure board is a quiet obituary for the route that lost its aircraft to get it there.