ukdean, did fr leave you stranded for 16hrs aswell..? you seem to hold a bit of a grudge! i also read with great interest in one of you previous threads that you complain about heathrow raising there charges by 80 odd percent,now your hoping they screw mol.....? you post with a certain amount of 'outside' naivety.....
Anyway,what you have to remember is 20 yrs ago, STN was virtually a farmers field, indeed it was so quiet base training was a regular occurance due to large runway and quiet airspace, then the likes of ryan came along with 2,3,15,30 odd aircraft based at the airport, i think the highest number was about 42 based aircraft, operating a few hundred flights a day, bringing around 50,000 pax through the airport PER DAY, thats a lot of parking (at £12 per day), duty free (££££), sandwiches (+++£££) and all the other things that you pay for in the airport, im sure that the revenue BAA made covered the "discount" they gave to Ryanair. so now BAA decide they want to charge a bit more, is it fair, i dont know, but you can guarantee they wont be clamping any 738s anytime soon, that would be over 50% of the traffic through STN gone, every day, 364 days a year, thats a lot of money that BAA are going to lose on revenue within the airport! so i can guess i can see where Ryanair are coming from on this issue, in a time when the price of oil is a major threat to our industry,we need to keep people flying, because with out them spending cash its not just airlines that suffer, its all the ancillary industries that go with it. i guess they call it a catch 22,No Ryanair,No money,with Ryanair,some landing fee's and lots of money.
its a funny old thing this aviation buisness, wonder what STN would have been like without FR and Easy? interesting thought.......
lgww