I think the new easy route from Belfast to Inverness will be at less than a daily service? BRS-ORK is 26 minutes flight time so the associated costs would be tiny bit less so the entire rotation would be less than 1.5 hours.
Apart from easy currently having a mix of classic 737s, NGs and A319 aircraft would there be any new opportunities at some point in the future of a European loco having a mix of say, NGs/A32X and something like ERJ 190s in the way JetBlue are intending to go in the next few years? I guess costs go up again and good economies of scale are reduced.
Most of the more recent UK airports now attracting locos like CVT, BOH, Doncaster/Sheffield (Finningley) have large catchment areas in terms of population so most of the UK locos can still put 737 type equipment on their new routes without having to consider route establishing aircraft like ERJ 190/70s, ATRs or Dash 8 aircraft. BEE are of course the exception using the lovely Q400s for their recent expansion.
This is where somewhere like Cork is still caught? Catchment area still relatively small compared to a UK city and it not being viable to put daily 737 size aircraft on routes like CVT, BRS, GLA etc. Makes it even more difficult then to establish new low cost routes to Europe from Cork? Mind you if Ryanair can throw on a daily 737-800 from Liverpool to Cork that kind of service could be started from any other Ryanair base too? And if RE take two more ATR-72s a lot could be done from Cork to north and west France and one of my own chestnuts, a two weekly to Bilbao?