Skipness, you get real. I was dealing with the problems generated by the attitude of BA and its predecessors long before your daddy knew what a twinkle in his eye was, let alone dreamt of you.
BA did not screw Prestwick. The airport is 30 miles from its population centre and lost a great deal of relevance once the range of transatlantic aircraft increased and more when Abbotsinch was able to handle long range traffic.
As far as Manchester is concerned, the airport is 10 miles from the city and in the heart of a region with as many people within a 75 mile radius of the city centre as within 75 miles of Charing Cross (2001 census). The region is quite capable of generating long range traffic as can be seen by the healthy use of Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Dubai and Qatar as transit points.
No-one can blame foreign airlines, which provide direct services from MAN to their hub, for looking for connecting passengers. At least they have the sense to realise there is both point to point and transit traffic.
What BA, which still claims to be Britain's premier airline when it promotes itself around the world, has done is to follow in the footsteps of its constituent antecedents. It has decided not just to treat the provinces as foreign territory from which to feed its hub and ignore the potential to compete for long haul and European direct services, it has deliberately put pressure on its alliance partners to reduce Manchester and other non Heathrow airports' services - e.g. AA no longer serves Dallas - Manchester which in the 1990s had an MD11 service, and has reduced a daily MAN-ORD service - twice a day in summer - to 5 days a week this winter.
Worse, QANTAS, which had excellent VFR traffic and operated over a number of European points to MAN during the period of its service was, as soon as BA took a large shareholding, forced to fly one Sydney service a day on from LHR to MAN instead of the flight over a European point. This looked good at the time for MAN as the airline stated that the reason was it was cheaper to keep the aircraft on the ground at MAN than LHR - thus more revenue for MAN.
What they didn't say was that the Sydney -London service used was the busiest of the day, few Manchester passengers could get a booking as the computer gave the London pax priority and the sector to/from MAN often had less than 50 pax, compared to the 150-170 generated regularly when the service was flown over a European point and the computer did not discriminate against MAN bookings.
Of course the BA bean counters soon pointed to the poor performance ex MAN and pulled the service.
The MAN pax, denied access to the service when it was operating, quickly learned that SIA, Emirates and others offered not only another way to travel but often offered better on board service.
Thus MAN can now support Emirates, Qatar and Etihad, on which a good percentage of the passengers are heading down under.
But it doesn't end there. BA stil has enormous influence in the corridors of power. Its input into discussions on bilateral arrangements and access to the UK is listened to and often acted upon. There is still a great deal of left over belief in Whitehall and Westminster that BA is still the chosen instrument of British civil air transport regardless of the fact that it has been a private company for over 20 years and should have no more or less weight given by government to its needs and opinions as, say, Highland Airways.
Having said all that, BA aren't the only culprits when it comes to screwing Manchester - and other provincial - passengers. Over the last 3 decades I've repeatedly tried to have airline and holiday company CEOs and marketeers explain why Manchester inclusive tour passengers are surcharged on flights to North America compared to Gatwick, when the distances involved are the same or less - with the Gatwick aircraft often overflying MAN on their direct flights.
Manchester as a city has changed beyond recognition in the last 30 years -particularly since the IRA bomb.
Over the next decade there will be a continuation of the growth in the migration of companies and institutions to the North for many reasons - a growth which will pervade through and beyond the current economic difficulties.
It will be very interesting to see just how long it will take the likes of BA to get the message - or how long before they miss out big style.
Looking back 40 years and more the Southern wiseacres postulated that airports like Manchester would never prosper or support anything more than a handful of services. Even a Labour Minister in Wilson's government, who should have known better, told a Manchester Airport Committee meeting in 1968 that the airport couldn't expect much growth over the coming 20 years as there would be no demand from Northerners to travel.
So, before advising those of us who've been there, done it all and got the t-shirt, having sat through days of meetings, heard every argument and who, against all the odds, have succeeded in developing travel to/from MAN, to "get real" you might just think that some people know a great deal more of the background to the reality than you and have years of experience of watching the fiddling of figures, the twisting of arguments and the straightforward statement that Heathrow comes first, middle and last, regardless of the wishes of a vast proportion of the UK travelling public
Last edited by philbky; 16th Nov 2008 at 20:38.