Bagso, you seem to correlate the success of MAN with the success of the city of Manchester, afraid you can't, MAN is the de-facto gateway for Northern England, it sits in the middle of 4 of the UKs largest urban conurbations, Merseyside, Gtr Manc, West Yorkshire and West Mids, add Lancashire, East Yorks, Cheshire etc you begin to understand why there is no point in comparing BHX to MAN. BHX serves predominanty the city of Birmingham and in my opinion is doing a decent, not brilliant but a decent job of it. MAN serves a much wider geography and as such any comparison is between the 2 airports is frankly daft.