Regional Airport forecast
Really hard to take the report mentioned in MAN777's post seriously. A similar article on the report was published on The Telegraph website. The source is quoted as being the Department for Transport, who have got forecasts spectacularly wrong before now, but this doesn't even start off with accurate figures. If we are talking the timeframe 2008-2050, which is the only one quoted, where on earth are the 30 million passengers and 321,000 annual movements at MAN? Those are the sort of figures forecast at the Runway 2 Inquiry for 2005 and as we painfully know, have never even been approached. Perhaps someone at the DfT forgot to check what actually happened. But given the similar fantasy figures quoted for other airports, including Plymouth which has or is about to close, I am suspecting that a journo has got this horribly mixed up somewhere along the line. If it were April there might be an explanation.