Richard Branson has reaffirmed his backing for Heathrow as the best place to build a new runway in the UK.

Earlier this year the president of Virgin Atlantic appeared to sit on the fence over where he wanted to see additional capacity when he said both airports would benefit from expansion.

However, he now sees the south-west London hub as the logical choice.

“I’ve always said that I think Heathrow is where people want to fly from. Heathrow is where all the businesses are set up and that is certainly our ideal first choice,” Branson said.

The airline’s founder said that slot constraints meant that Virgin Atlantic continuously had to make tough decisions over its network.

“At the moment at Heathrow if we wanted to do a new route we’d have to close a current route, we have no other choice. There are no other slots at Heathrow.”

The difficulties encountered by the transatlantic carrier are not shared by sister airlines such as Virgin Australia, which Branson said had been free to grow and challenge the dominant carrier Qantas.

“If a new runway is built at Heathrow, I’m absolutely certain that by the time it’s built there will be planes which will be more energy efficient than the current planes, and that it will bring many routes … that Virgin Atlantic would want to fly to.”

Branson was speaking at a press conference to mark the launch of Virgin Atlantic’s new route to Atlanta and the delivery of its first Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Appearing alongside him was the airline’s chief executive Craig Kreeger, who outlined the plans for the new jet.

“We’ll start with Boston and stay on the east coast [of the US] in the early days as we build up the number of pilots who have done many landings on that airplane. So we’ll be flying to places that are shorter haul for Virgin

Atlantic for the first several months,” he said.

Kreeger said the new focus on the US – with routes cut to places like Mumbai and Tokyo – was not a deliberate strategy.

“We didn’t have a goal to move from east to west or try to become more US-centric. It’s simply that we let the performance take us where our customers wanted to go, and as we looked at the routes that were performing well

and those that were performing less well it suggested there were opportunities to take advantage of a partner [Delta] at this end.”