Originally Posted by ExpectmorePayless
LBA 0700 - LCY 0810
LCY 0840 - LBA 0950/1020 - LCY 1130
LCY 1200 - JER 1330/1400 - LCY 1530
LCY 1600 - LBA 1710/1740 - LCY 1850
LCY 1920 - LBA 2030
MME 0710 - LCY 0820
LCY 0850 - MME 1000/1030 - LCY 1140
LCY 1210 - GCI 1340/1410 - LCY 1540
LCY 1610 - MME 1720/1750 - LCY 1900
LCY 1930 - MME 2040
OK, credit to you for trying to devise a feasible schedule, so please take the following as constructive criticism.
The absence of LCY slots has already been noted. In general if carriers are reducing frequencies in LCY they'll try to rejig their existing slot portfolios to maintain the best slots, so the chances of a new entrant obtaining (for example) an 0820-0850 slot pair at LCY are slim to none.
But let's assume that LCY slots magically come available (and that Scot Airways magically decides to relaunch scheduled flying under its own name)...
The Dornier 328 could never be accused of having a low operating cost per seat
so it needs to be deployed on high-yield sectors to have a chance of profitability (believe me, I know
). Your proposed peak morning MME-LCY probably fits this bill, and possibly the 0850 LCY-MME and 1750 MME-LCY, but IMHO that's about it. Why would a business passenger pay a premium for a late morning flight to/from MME or LBA, or a midday flight to/from Guernsey or Jersey? And in the evening, if I am a business traveller who's come down from MME for a day's meetings in London, why would I want to hang around until 1930 for a flight home when I could have taken a train two hours earlier and been home in the same time? (This argument applies
a fortiori to Leeds with its even better train service.)
In other words, most of the sectors in the proposed schedule would be relatively low-yield - filled with the sort of VFR and non-time-sensitive passengers interviewed in the press article mentioned
earlier on the MME thread. I don't mean to rain on your parade, but there is a vast gulf between a purely theoretical schedule and a potentially profitable one. So perhaps (since this isn't Spotters' Corner
) it's time that we pinch ourselves and return to the real world...
C.