Originally Posted by
Sean North
My point is Cardiff shouldn't focus specifically on a niche and be satisfied with that.
By no means should Cardiff try to become the next Bristol or Heathrow but there is room for over 2m annual passengers. The leakage - one thing that is seldomly mentioned in the obsessive propensity to fly debate - is over 2.5 passengers from South Wales. 2m passengers from Bristol start in South Wales and in 2010 there were 500k passengers using London airports for popular short haul routes. I certainly believe with the support and drive, 2m annual passengers is not far-fetched.
On top of that 2m passengers, there is room for expanded engineering facilities. BA is there but even BA is cutting back aircraft serviced there. More Welsh Govt support for aerospace engineering in Wales would be helpful. Cargo and other industries centred around the airport can also be expanded, for example, an aircraft paining operation could be set up
With a bigger aviation industry will come higher paying jobs... and more jobs overall. That is obviously a good thing.
If the airlines aren’t interested your efforts are wasted! Thats the whole point in trying to make. Same applies to MRO facilities, you state that BA are reducing use of their own facility there, I don’t know whether that is the case or not, but it would appear there is no appetite for it. That is why CWL must double down on what it does well so it can survive and possibly look to grow in future should operating conditions permit.
I think this point is lost on some, but there are far less airlines in operation in the U.K. now than there were 20 years ago. Since the financial crash of 2007/08 it has been consolidation all the way. The smaller airports have lost out to this with a growing focus of centralising assets on one larger regional airport.
If those 2.5 million passengers are flying from other airports, and 2 million of those are flying from BRS (as suggested further up the page), then that would suggest as a crude estimate that 20% of the passengers on a given flight from BRS are from the South Wales region. Why would they duplicate this at Cardiff and split their loads and decimate their yields whilst doubling their costs over night?
Bmibaby did ok but they were wrapped up a long time ago, same again for Flybe and same happened there. Wizzair UK didn’t stick around that long. It’s all telling, meanwhile easyjet, Ryanair and Jet2 keep building their presence at BRS.