BHX is in my view an under-utilized and attractive airport. It has a huge catchment area with excellent transport links and does not suffer from the same runway and (road) traffic congestion as the London area airports. If the HS2 white elephant included BHX airport this could be a winning formula.
Somewhere, I have some stats as to how many people live within 'x' miles of BHX compared to LHR - stats which need to be considered with caution as 10 million 'Midlanders' may not produce the same potential yield on the routes as 10 million 'South Easters'. If I can find this later I'll post a bit more.
One has to assume that the airlines have done their research on this and concluded that longhaul routes out of BHX wouldn't be profitable, but I wonder if there isn't a political agenda to keep traffic routed through LHR/LGW.
http://www.pprune.org/airlines-airpo...announced.html