Not good at all, but certainly not unexpected, despite the fact that (as bristolflyer states) the revised master plan is not as significant a change as some would have wanted and to me at least always seemed to be very sympathetic to environmental and other concerns.
It now seems that the airport will now seek to expand as far as possible within the confines of current planning rules to enable us to get up to the projected 9 million pax per year with no expansion and then re submit a planning application, in which they can state that granting the expansion will not involve any rise in passenger or movement numbers. Unfortunately in the meantime this will involve a lot more work for my team in the terminal and probably a drop in the quality of the passengers experience. We want to try to achieve as much of this growth as possible outside of our operational peaks, but this will never be achieved while we are taking more based aircraft (FR) It is naïve however to think that the airport will stop taking on any new routes that become available because of terminal space. Lack of parking stands will prove a problem, but those are being added to and reassessed to provide more space all the time (e.g. Night parking the KLM on 16) so expect to see more of that.