Well, certainly no sign of any denting of RAL's confidence within the 'Airport Surface Access Strategy' - in fact, if anything, they seem even more bullish with talk of a possible 500,000 pax in 2007.
Interesting to note that they are talking of commencing construction of the new terminal/rail station this year.
They will certainly look rather silly if nothing comes of their current airline negotiations.
Getting back to the EMB-195, doing a back-of-an-envelope calculation (not having access to the performance graphs) I reckon if you limited the payload to around 100 pax that should give a range of some 850nm. That would still be an 85% load factor and might be preferable to a tech-stop I would have thought. I seem to recall that PMI was 720nm, although I stand to be corrected. I wonder if Flybe would find that scenario acceptable.