MAN's long-haul back to greatness
The loss of bmi long-haul from MAN is no surprise yet a body blow to the short-to-medium term aspirations of an airport which has always seen itself to be something more than just a large regional airport. The familiar words about low yields reveal the limitations as to what an airport company can do to help make services profitable if the catchment market won't pay the required fares.
Yet for my money, MAN remains in the longer term the best placed (in every sense) UK regional to grow long-haul services. Given the apparent economics of full-service long-haul, I find it difficult to understand the fragmentation we have seen in recent years across the UK regions:- Emirates from NCL, PIA from LBA, Air India from BHX, US Air from BHX next year. Of course there are local niche markets for these services, but in aviation-geography terms these airports are rather near to Heathrow and very near to MAN, which has excellent surface access. One would question the economics of spreading cost and resources across what is effectively the same catchment in order to gain perhaps a crumb or two of market-share. Such fragmentation has undermined MAN's role as the principal gateway airport outside London and in my opinion stifled the development of a critical mass of long-haul services here. LBA is not much nearer, and a damn site harder to get to from most of West Yorkshire, than is MAN. To have intercontinental services departing from cities just 40 miles apart to the same destinations is curious economics. Me wonders whether some local politics / diplomacy amongst the ex-pat communities is involved?
MAN - 2 x 3000+m runways, 24H opening, CAT III, rail station, direct motorway link, 3 terminals, cargo centre, arguably the second city-region of the UK. Surely, only MAN makes sense if and when tentative toes are poked out from beyond the big smoke 15 west of London.