Originally Posted by
FL370 Officeboy
For those championing the train and how it will be the death knell for domestic flying - that won't happen until such time trains route direct from the cities to the hub airports. It doesn't matter how fast HS2 is from the north to London, no-one is going to lug their bags across London when they can just check their bags in at MAN / NCL / EDI / GLA and connect through the hub to a longhaul flight. Point to point domestic flying is not why BA (and in future VIrgin Connect) operate domestic flights.
About 15 years ago, my family and I dropped our bags at a regional airport and got a domestic flight into LHR for an international connection. Our bags joined a massive pile of about 12,000 other bags in a massive room and we received them about a week later. The airline were still allowing people to drop their bags at their origin airport knowing that they would go into the pile and didn't insist on people taking them across the airport manually. The "official" line was that a conveyor belt had broken but I think there was more to it than that.
Nonetheless, I can see why someone who hadn't experienced that would want to have their bags automatically transferred from one aircraft to another.
I feel badly for the staff at Flybe, it can't be nice having to operate a safety-critical service with the amount of uncertainty going on. I think that if there is to be a service connecting regional airports not involving one of the larger hubs, it would have to have some sort of protection from competition or a subsidy, in the way that the railway does, in order for such a service to be profitable.