Mr Woodroffe's success will be dependent on coaxing some serious investment cash out of the notoriously miserly Charlie Cornish. And - yes - I know that money is especially tight right now. But pointing at T2's (super-value-engineered) enhancements isn't sufficient. A very substantial proportion (over half?) of MAN's passengers still use T1 and T3 and will continue to do so for some considerable time yet. What has been spent on them in the last decade? This neglect can't continue. Those terminals need a major refresh: working lifts, escalators, travelators. Regularly cleaned toilets with functioning locks. Seating. These things shouldn't break the bank, but Cornish's regime has resisted spending on them anyway. The interminable trudge from T3 to T2 over an entirely shut-down sequence of dead travelators is an embarrassment and a disgrace. How are older or mobility-impaired customers with luggage supposed to cope with this? There should be a free inter-terminals shuttle bus running via the Ground Transport Interchange until they are fixed or replaced.
Facilities for domestic passengers need to be moved IMMEDIATELY to a dedicated section of T2 with their own security channel. Years of excuses and prevarication have killed the domestic market at MAN for routes which compete with road and rail. If you're needing to travel from Manchester to Southampton, do you expect to join a security queue of thousands of Ryanair passengers who have been advised to turn up with three hours to spare? No wonder this once core route is down to a single daily 29-seater which gets cancelled more often than not. Exeter has failed already. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Southend. MAN's domestic flight arrangements are a non-starter, and we're seeing overland routes failing in real time because of this abject neglect. Domestic carriers can't carry the financial hit this 'allow three hours' chaos invites. And it was a painfully easy problem to identify. Will domestic carriers return once they've given up on MAN's dysfunctional arrangements for them? MAN needs their connectivity to support long-haul success, so perhaps they should sort out the problem RIGHT NOW, because significant damage has already been done. Movable future timeframes simply don't cut it. Jam tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. Giving domestic flights their own dedicated facility in T2 should be THE most pressing priority to sort out. Top of the pile.
Finally, but not least, the Cornish regime's managed destruction of MAN's cargo capability needs to be reversed. Mr Woodruffe: welcome to the busiest airport in Europe not to have a hi-lo available on site, or a team trained to operate it. I would call that 'third-world', but it wouldn't be fair on the many third-world airports which do have ample hi-los and staff to operate them.
T2's enhancements represent the kind of progress we need to see, though final completion is a long way off. So those 50%+ of MAN's customers using the rest of the campus can't continue to be disregarded indefinitely. T1 and T3 are part of the "Manchester experience" too.
Last edited by OzzyOzBorn; 9th Jun 2022 at 18:38.