Hi Rainboe,
There are two issues on the table here which in reality are entirely separate. The first is "safety" and if the suggestion is that there has been, for the last 24 years, a consistent failure by the CAA, the management of many of Europe's major airlines and thousands of aircrew with regard to LBA operations then SURELY there is a moral and professional duty to blow the whistle. If you think something is unsafe and a risk to passenger safety, you tell people in authority that it's unsafe and you keep escalating upwards until someone listens. Isn't that how it works? The resurfacing fiasco at BRS in the very recent past would seem to suggest so.
If on the other hand you aren't exposing an institutional failure across the industry and instead are simply playing your favoured "I'm toxic" pantomime villain role, you might want to choose your language more carefully. You're the first to jump up and down in response to media hyperbole and sensationalism , especially when it threatens job security , so maybe it's time for you to afford the same level of respect to the 2,000 or so people who depend on the airport for their employment.
In other words, it's time to put up or shut up.
The viability of the airport as a business is something different altogether. The history of the airport and the development of an alternative is dogged by political interference, poor decision making and a lack of investment. Dumb decisions spanning the last 45 years have a much greater influence on the 2008 route network than a runway length and profile that operators have been working with for 24 years.
LBA is hardly unique in this regard as I'm sure anyone who is close to the case of Filton vs Lulsgate in the South West is well aware. Yet the reality is that with over a decade of private ownership behind it. BRS is one of the country's most successful provincial airports; big passenger throughput, wide and varied route network and an important economic contributor. LBA is just 18 months into the same journey with a management team comprised of, entirely without coincidence, the architects of various stages of the Bristol revolution. Who would have thought it? And just as BRS success was based on an aggressive commercial strategy to win airline business, a big and proud
PR strategy to win the hearts and minds of the locals and investment in passenger facilities, so we see the same unfolding at LBA. Folk expecting parallel taxiways and runway extensions,will be disappointed. Just because it exists in some shiny pdf brochure means nothing. The one thing BRS did invest in was CAT3 and similarly the only thing I'd expect them to now do at LBA is bump up 14 to CAT2 which would take away about two thirds of the 80 or so diversions each year. If the CAA approve it, it might even come with an extra 100m of LDA due to changes to the threshold. Apart from that, passenger facilities, route development and marketing is where they will spend. The big unknown is whether they will hold their nerve through the recession.
682