Watch the media miss the point in this report. I think it is summarised beautifully on page 30 (section 2.2) of the report:
"It was therefore apparent that senior members of the airport’s operations team did not have an adequate understanding of aircraft operations and the planning requirements of other airport departments."
Take the whole shabang one step up the corporate ladder and you can see the moneygrabbing ideas behind employing graduates from the Harvard School of Business Management whose comprehension of airfield operations is in doubt but will think of profits first. I'd bet a pound to a penny that the management team would pull out all the stops if one of their precious retail areas was out of commission for a week or so.
So, we have Wythenshaw Municipal Airport, one of the busiest shopping centres in the UK, with a management team that is shown in this report to be barely able to organise a p!ssup in a brewery when it comes to non-direct profit areas of running their operation with regards to operational requirements involving safety. Some of us wonder why it is taking so long to keep moving that darned hole around the ramp and taxiways. Well, now you have your answer.
The Xcel crew were a bit too relaxed about their operation and no doubt will have learnt a valuable lesson from all this when it comes to what has to be done in a proper briefing session. At the same time, thanks to their mistakes, the real side of modern airport/retail operations has been exposed. I just hope the media are able to extract the relevant parts of the report and show the rest of the travelling public what really is behind the yukspeak that comes from the corporate heads of these Plc's that claim safety really comes before profits.
