I fly from Liverpool a lot, normally to Faro. I use Manchester for long haul mainly, like tomorrow i'm off to Bangkok with Turkish for Christmas ; -) .
I also used to fly on British Midland from LPL to LHR quite a bit too, and felt it was a big shame when that ended, same for MME and LBA (although I know BA went back to fill LBA gap). There are loads of regional airports that lost their LHR link over the years NWI, HUY NQY, BHX,EMA probably more. Many of these now use Amsterdam as their hub, which means London is loosing this business and its link to the regions, which I don't think is a good thing, and probably adds to the problem the UK has with Londoncentric attitudes. Of course driving from these regions to Heathrow since their links have gone has got much much worse, their are coach links (still stuck in traffic) train (try that from Norwich to Heathrow !) Domestic transport is in my opinion poor in the UK.
As to Liverpool's London air links, since BMA, Easyjet operated a successful service to Luton, again I used it often, and sat on full 737s. The route ended because of the introduction of APD, and I recall them making quite a bit of noise about this. Since then of course the train has got much faster ( although often not cheap, the dearest in Europe I read at weekend !!). Will remain to see what happens in the future, if you could catch a train from say Crewe or Manchester or Liverpool directly to Heathrow Airport, this would negate air links to LHR. This would really need to be replicated nationwide to the SW , East Anglia, East Midlands and so on. Would it ever happen ? Maybe re establishing some domestic routes is desirable.
