As a one time resident of Yorkshire I too followed the development plans for the new DSA and remember thinking that its location was too far distant from the the main cities of Sheffield and Leeds to be able to compete with Manchester and East Midlands airports. However if excellent connections by motorway and rail directly into the airport were built it might have a chance. It would also need to attract major airlines operating a good and frequent range of services to make it worthwhile for people in Leeds, Hull and Sheffield to take the time to get to the airport instead of Manchester. Potential passengers from Bradford, Halifax etc would always prefer Manchester. Ideally it would need airlines like AF, KLM, Lufthansa etc to provide onward connections. It was a big IF as to whether this would work. In the meantime the Lo Cos have arrived and LBA and EMA have grown making these airports more popular, and more local! It already cost the developers a lot of money to get DSA up and running but it seems to me that this was not enough and public money was needed to massively improve the communications, something that Leeds, Sheffield and Hull city councils were reluctant to do. The opposite seems to be happening and the owners must be losing a lot of money right now, also those retailers and others with businesses at the airport.