In your last post one could ask so equally why should anyone be forced to travel to Blackpool or Durham to make that short hop to a London Airport !
Because it is their local airport and a much shorter journey than MAN.
BTW few in the UK probably make a decisive choice of departure point particularly in the budget sector .
No they will look at many of those consolidators and cheap fare offers .
We are not talking about the budget sector nor are we talking about holiday charters. When talking about LHR we are generally talking about scheduled services to cities worldwide. Many of which will never be viable from a single regional airport.
I think the North needs to have an if not equal, a significant counter weight and that has to be Manchester as a split operation each side of the Pennines simply dilutes the offer to the point where it potentially collapses.
There is not the infrastructure in the north to support this. Hence taking a shuttle flight to LHR onto a dedicated runway with a good connection setup works better for a large part of the north than slogging it over to MAN. We know people are currently doing just this via AMS instead of travelling through Manchester.
I am far from anti additional runway capacity however have great difficulty with the current R3 proposals on costs and benefits as presented, and predicted especially when all the trends and educated analysis and models point to the major growth potential in the industry being elsewhere.
With the modern rail network being built and connected to LHR it is the only sensible option. To build Crossrail, HS2 and the western rail link to LHR and then expand LGW instead would be absurd. My view is we should expand both as they both cater for different markets but if it
has to be only one then it should be LHR.
Again I note you tried to ignore the evident case that contrary to one of your arguements key tenants that being of regional services from the likes of Leeds right now already pretty much fail the test .
Again BA and indeed customers from Leeds and surroundings haven’t exactly been a sparkly success story and quite the contrary
What test? The new runway is not built yet. The BA regionals are always the first to be canned when it stacks up at LHR so it isn't accurate to gauge interest in a project that isn't functional yet. I used to use this weekly to get back to Leeds and there were many people using it then and praising it. A handful of flights don't make a hub however.