Could not agree with you more with regards to Continental - they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were to move to an all B757 programme.
You have to remember that the plans for summer 2005 was for 2 B757s, but as has been said the airport authority appears to have drawn their attention to the error of their ways. Hopefully the same will happen for next year, once the schedules have been tweeked.
Now to passenger figures. It is good to see from the airport's website that terminal passengers were up 5.26pc to 2,047,535 for October. The strongest growing sector was scheduled International traffic at 16.48pc and domestic at 3.7pc (will we finally see a month were the domestic percentage increase in passengers will the larger than the increase in movements - ie the loadfactors get better?).
By the way, the increases at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted for the same month were -0.08, +2.5, +0.6 respectively, so Manchester certainly appears to have had a good throughput.
Scottie Dog