A lot of the recent "debate" was sparked by the fact that March passenger figures were down.
March and April figures are always generally confusing because of where the Easter Holidays fall. Last year Easter was on 4th April and so the start of the holidays were in March; this year Easter falls on 24th April - about as late as it can be and 3 weeks later than last year.Therefore there is none of the Easter 2011 break traffic in the March figures.
It is therefore usual not to read too much into individual figures from March and April, but to look at the combined March + April figures to get a sensible idea of trends. In addition, the Airport's financial year end is at the end of March - and reporting figures therefore get skewed as some FY's can have most of two Easter peaks in and some times hardly any. I know there were discussions at some stage to change the financial year end to get rid of this issue but it didn't happen.
This time around, as compton3b has pointed out, April's comparisons will be distorted because of the volcanic ash debacle. No doubt this will complicate Olten Pete's detailed analysis of BHX! Hopefully MAN will do the work for us and give out figures with and without the effects of the ash cloud.
. Can anyone remember how many days were affected? Certainly there were at least 6 days off (15th -20th incl) but I remember some other closures too - some of which were in May just to complicate the situation further.
And finally the proximity of bank and public holidays at the end of April also serve to make comparisons difficult.
So when the figures come out at the end of the month, no doubt there will be another interesting discussion
Suzeman