This might be getting into thread drift - mods please advise if you think this should be a separate thread.
Given the high profile that commercial aviation has in Europe, I would have expected the EU, national Govt, or at the very least someone in a university to have wanted to do and publish some sort of research into how adding flights to regional airports would affect local employment. At the very least, academics in universities are always looking for something new to publish. It just becomes a matter of trawling through various journals and EU reports to find the relevant data - which is exactly the kind of thing the ERAA should know about when it comes to lobbying policymakers in Govt as it becomes much easier to convince ministers that way. Think how good it would look for MOL if he could back up his claims on job creation from a neutral body whenever the EU investigates Govt-owned airports paying FR substantial marketing fees - just claim it as a valid job creation measure ! I note the ERAA have not in this case referred to data from a neutral source.
The 2-page document from the ERAA reads and looks like a
PR document, saying only how wonderful the aviation industry is. The golden rule in
PR is never to lie, but one can always be selective in what is discussed. Thus in stating a 'jobs created' figure, one could choose a set of assumptions under which the job creation figure looks best. Furthermore, if you worked for the ERAA and knew that your salary ultimately was paid by regional airlines and airports - it would seem a bad career move to publish something negative about aviation.
A while ago, an Irish airport (Dublin ?) refused to subsidise a Ryanair route to Morocco (Marrakech ?). FR responded by saying how many *Irish* tourism jobs would be lost. I've seen a lot of tourists from north Europe in Morocco, but I haven't seen many Moroccan tourists in north Europe.
Yes, aviation does create jobs, but I think the ERAA and FR are both overstating the job creation rate.