Windsheer: You misunderstand. I didn't state my opinion, merely a fact. It's not a "lack of ground staff." It's not a question of "neglect in a delay situation." It's not a question of "need the backing of their handling agents." You can't force people to stay back for delayed flights and work sixteen hour shifts as a result. Flight decks don't work sixteen hour shifts, they have legal limits on what they can work and once those limits are exceeded they can't fly. Flights are frequently delayed because crews are out of hours. Standard Operating Procedure at any airport is that the handling agent will safeguard an on-time departure ahead of handling a delayed flight. All handling agents do this.
Unfortunately I can't really comment on "passenger agents and dispatchers not having any issues with staying back and why should there be an issue on the ramp." You may be right, but then again there probably are issues that neither of us are aware of. Most of the ramp staff are represented by a different union, maybe it's something to do with that.
A few questions out of interest. Which flight or flights would you have had delayed to release a crew for your flight? How do you think their flight decks would feel about this? More to the point, how would YOU feel if Servisair delayed your flight because they handled an a/c that was delayed ahead of loading yours?
On the subject of a second handling agent, It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone like Menzies/Swissport etc did move into Bristol, however I doubt that it'll happen in the near future. There's too many issues to address that the airport would have problems with in the short term. Where to house their check-in and ramp crews offices to start with, and where do they park their equipment? Space is at a premium. You can't have one agent doing all the marshalling, bus driving, ambulifts etc if there's two agents, so who does this and who carries out the training? It's all very well speculating about a second agent arriving, but so many people forget about all the associated issues that would need to be addressed as a result.
