Knock seems to be emerging from the pandemic fairly well judging by the schedule for next summer. 16 Ryanair routes in addition to the daily Aer Lingus service. Good to see Lanzarote back with the return of the base there, though maybe a surprise that it's only once a week for now as it's such a popular route locally, especially with Tenerife not coming back at this point in time.
Other than that all the summer 2022 routes are back, including Edinburgh and Cologne as well as the year round Bergamo route being retained. Increased frequencies on a number of the regional English routes also.
It's very much a Ryanair airport now since the old Flybe went bust, with Ryanair having taken on all of the old Flybe routes other than Leeds, which is still unserved. There's positives and negatives to that obviously. On the plus side the total available seat capacity for 2023 will be well over a million, probably the highest there has ever been at Knock and there's certainly the potential for a record breaking year in 2023 if any of the obvious threats ranging from Covid to oil prices to the recession don't do too much damage.
The main downside is probably that it's hard to see a regional or a charter airline trying anything new from Knock anytime soon with Ryanair's coverage of the core UK and sun routes being so extensive at the moment.
The other issue is that the airport, particularly the apron, is really operating at capacity now at certain times of the day for much of the summer. It's not uncommon to see aircraft having to hold over Boyle/Carrick on Shannon or having to wait on the runway as there is no available apron space for aircraft. While I know there were larger infrastructure plans in place to resolve this, if it isn't going to be possible to fund this work anytime soon maybe a smaller scale expansion of the apron onto existing grass areas could be funded to accommodate another aircraft or two and fix this bottleneck for now.