Originally Posted by
SWBKCB
Would a London service be for "London" or for onward connections? If the latter, how is it different/better than KLM, and what would be the impact on them? KLM already use their smallest a/c on the minimum practicable schedule.
I would suggest it would have to be for both in order to work? (And that this is why none of the London and "London" airports that an operator could get into would work :-( ) Even if the impact on KLM was negative, I'd suggest that as there would be more people going to London itself rather than Amsterdam itself, the number of movements and passengers would increase overall, to the benefit of the airport.
Originally Posted by
M-JCS
But do they really have the right sizes of aircraft? Serious question.
In this age of "bigger is better" is a 70 seater really the smallest feasible aircraft to operate? It seems to me that this is what has left regional airports in a shambles, and I am not convinced passengers are really better off because of it. This obviously applies not just to DTV.
True. And passengers definitely lose. The problem is that because there is no regional operator with a range of sizes of aircraft there is a terrible disincentive to try a route that could physically be operated with a bigger aircraft. In the absence of transfer fees why grow a route just so someone with bigger aircraft can come and take it over (and possibly then keep it or even not keep it, depending on how they feel)? :-(
I definitely feel there is a market failure. It appeared that the main problems CityManxWing2 and LinksAir had were that they lacked the economies of scale required to, in the technical sense, be respectable operators of aircraft. It appeared that certainly there can be routes to Blackpool and Gloucester that are otherwise very much viable, but that there is nobody to operate and that would need to be part of a larger operator & network for the purposes of operating & marketing organisation (and I'm sure that DTV, Oxford, Cambridge and Shoreham could be the same). This is quite a shame :-(