Musket90, I stand corrected.
What I had taken as air bridges in STN at pier 3 were the walkways out at departures before you go down stairs.
I would think that these would be quite easy to modify going forward if BAA wanted to provide air bridges at 3? Just knock the end of these gateways and install the moving part of the bridge?
I would like to see my Irish tax payers money "wasted" on a couple of extra million making provisio's for air bridges now and never use them rather than in 10 years time finding out they are needed where it would probably cost five times what it would now while the terminal is being built?
On a note of air bridges. I happened to fly on a LCC from STN last week on holidays. Airline is question was SkyEurope and I got to experience at 1st hand the delays in turn around time that air bridges can cause.
Everyone going down the same ramp, not a good idea. To compound matter's, SkyEurope do seat allocations so we were further held up by people in the aircraft searching for their seat numbers. I was truely shocked at how slow boarding was.
Now, SkyEurope's policy of using air bridges at STN (dunno if this is forced on them or not by BAA as they may not have the facility at pier 1 to provide any other means of boarding?) and using seat allocation may not be the wisest and there is already has been discussions on them in other threards if they are going to survive in the long term so I dont want to start that debate here!
As a note, I couldn't help thinking if this was a FR flight we would have been boarded and 1/2 ways to Warsaw by the time we were ready to go!