It would be naive of me to think that LBA's new owners would be the answer to all the problems the airport faces. There are however some major issues which urgently need to be tackled which will hopefully enable us to attract new and varied business whilst simultaneously sticking two fingers up at those airlines and tour ops who dare to bugger our customers about.
We need a brand new terminal building. One that is large, easily extendable, non-curved with easy access to aircraft parking stands and a significant retail section. It could be sited on either the existing long stay or short stay car park, with a new multi storey for short stay. The current terminal can then be pulled down and the area concreted over to provide more apron and taxiing space for our aircraft. At the same time we'd lose rent-a-tent baggage hall B and all the other silly prefab buildings that take up valuable apron space.
The runway needs to be longer, I don't think there's any doubting that one. A few more feet (well, several hundred actually), preferably at the southeast end could make so much difference. At the very least, the 32 threshold needs budging back a bit so it's on a flat section of runway, making CAT3B ops on 32 a more realistic possibility than it is at the moment. I am fairly certain the technology now exists for at least CAT2 on runway 14. I'd be happy to hear from any ILS experts out there who can add some definitive answers to the debate.
Road access ? Not too sure about this one. It would be pretty difficult to widen and/or reroute the A658 given that it cuts through several built-up areas. Perhaps some sort of spur of the Leeds outer ring road may be the answer. I have a serious lack of knowledge of urban road planning so any better informed contributions are welcome.
I hope the likes of Macquarrie, BAA, TBI etc. have deep pockets. They'll certainly need them. Let's see.