Quote: "Berlin may be German's capital city - it's not the 1st (most important) which businesswise is Frankfurt am Main. I would also question by what yardstick Hamburg is the 2nd German city - it's certainly the biggest port city, but I would have said that, again, businesswise probably Munich and Stuttgart are more important."
The 1949 constitution deliberately set West Germany (as it was then) as a highly decentralised, devolved and deconcentrated federation, to avoid a repeat of recent history. However, this was relatively easy given Germany's history as several balkanised states until the growth of Prussia and eventual unification in 1870. Contrast that with the UK's and France's long history of centralisation.
Quote: "Whatever, even if BER and HAM don't have a network of intercontinental services flown by Lufthansa, they do have a much more comprehensive network of European services - most German airports do - than their UK equivalents. This is because Germany is a federal country, where the states (Laender) are roughly equal in importance, and all the state governments are really interested in growth of, and support for, their economies."
FRA is still the only major hub in Germany, MUC and DUS (the richest German cities incidentally!) are focus cities for LH like BHX, MAN and GLA were for BA back in the day. Berlin is capital and largest city (by population), but relatively unimportant in aviation terms, again because of recent history.
Quote: "To see how federalism works look how Edinburgh airport's scheduled network has grown since it became a "proper" capital city where the Scottish government sits, and wealds real power."
Not so, the UK remains a unitary state, how could it be federal with England under "direct rule"!?
Whilst the presence of the Scottish Executive has doubtless contributed to EDI's growth, it probably has more to do with large and growing (until recently at least) financial services and allied industries. If the presence of devolved government was the main factor, we would have seen the same at CWL and BHD in recent years and at BFS for much longer.
Quote: "You have to look to France for a country that is similar to the UK, where Paris is all dominant, and hence Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Strassburg etc don't have proper direct links to many principal cities by the National carrier - who could justifiably be referred to a "Paris Airways". Mind you, even in France their is a proper high speed rail network joining provincial cities to the metropolis - something the UK still doesn't have! "
In fairness to "Paris Airways" (AF), it has a much bigger range of domestic destinations out of CDG/ORY than "London Airways" (BA) does out of LHR/LGW/LCY, so a "proper high speed network" is not the issue here.
Last edited by Fairdealfrank; 6th June 2012 at 18:50.