It's taken Southend a long time to gain traction, and that's with a decent local population density and its own railway station. Southend for now is still largely feeding off the crumbs that the bigger airports are leaving. Flybe are unlikely to be interested in their future shape; maybe Loganair might take a look and KLM could possibly decide to have another go - otherwise I'm struggling to think of passenger airlines that would look seriously at Manston. Maybe Manston might be better suited to cargo instead but with water on 3 sides, poor road connectivity doesn't encourage freight companies
It'll be a long long time before there is demand at Manston for commercial flights from real airlines that pay non-negative airport fees carrying 500k pax during a year. Maybe it'll happen, but not by 2024
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 3rd Jul 2019 at 21:34.