Recently there appear to have been a number of negative posts with regards to services from Manchester - some warranted and others probably not.
I thought it would be an idea to look at the loads being produced from the long-haul scheduled carriers - as produced by the CAA in their provisional figures for the month of March:
Abu Dhabi - Ethihad - 12688. Seems to be an average load of 204 passengers.
Chicago - American/Bmi - 22165 - 178 average load - minus 4.60pc
Doha - Qatar Airways - 15884 - 256 average load - plus 48pc
Dubai - Emirates - 42532 - 343 average load - plus 22pc
New York JFK - British Airways/Delta/Pakistan - 16087 - plus 51pc *
New York Newark - Continental - 17955 - 144 average load - plus 23pc *
Orlando - Virgin - 23367 - plus 11pc
Philadephia - US Air - 11879 - 191 average load - minus 14pc *
Tehran - Mahan Air - 2200. plus 156pc *
Figures marked with an * show questionable load factors as I seem to recall that the Eastern Seaboard of the USA was effected by bad weather and therefore there may have been a number of cancelled flights.
Within Europe there have been a number of cancelled services as a result of the BA/Flybe merger. I have therefore deliberately not undertaken a comparison of last year. The following routes do however seem to have performed exceptionally well:
Istanbul - THY - 6664 - 107 average load - plus 15pc
Luxembourg - Luxair/VLM - 4070- plus 483pc * VLM new on the route
Zurich - Swiss - 14382 - plus 21pc
As can be seen, all is not lost, and hopefully things will start to look better in the longer term. Remember that BAConnect cancelled 21pc of their slots from Manchester - and that is one heck of a lot to have to make up.
Scottie Dog