Originally Posted by
EI-BUD
CaptainDoony
I can understand your frustration. I think the challenge is not so much are the said routes you mention viable or profitable. The question increasingly is with airlines, what markets can we make the most from the aircraft and a route such as say ABZ AGP is fairly long sector and most of a day is gone when the flight is completed. I think this will be more the case going forward as airlines consolidate and like in the UK there are just less and less airlines as time goes by. so many names vanishing from the scene.
This is absolutely spot-on.
I work with a lot of airports and a constant theme is "we've done the business case for this route, it looks quite reasonable, so why can we not get an airline to operate it?" As EI-BUD says, there are simply fewer candidate airlines out there these days, especially in the regional sector. Consolidation, fuel prices, and the march of the LCCs have all taken their toll. So you can have a business case for a route which genuinely looks as though it will turn a reasonable profit for an airline...but few or no appropriate carriers to pitch that route to. And having a
theoretical strongly profitable route or routes is not much consolation for an airport!
Unless a carrier has some local roots or is actively seeking out a niche it can dominate, it is hard to make the case for low-frequency routes into smaller markets (especially if the block time is relatively long). I'd agree that the likes of bmi regional perhaps offers the best opportunity for at least some routes - they have aircraft available, they have local knowledge, and they are (presumably) in search of defensible niches.