Originally Posted by
WOWBOY
People here saying the airport cant support air services? Well if the airport was in 2009 UK's Fastest growing airport and merely a year later becomes unviable then something is up.
I appreciate the enthusiasm, but if you are going to argue, at least do so with reasonable evidence. If I run Little Fotherington Airfield with a total of 10 scheduled passengers in 2010 and it gets 100 passengers the next year it'll have 900% growth year-on-year and be the UK's fastest growing airport. That says precisely nothing about whether the routes or the airport are sustainable. Go back and look at Manston's year-on-year growth when EUJet launched if you like - I'd say they were high up the growth stakes that year, just off a very low base.
As a general point, I am just not convinced by some of the numbers used by the pro-PLH campaigners. Again, this is not having a pop at anyone, but airline economics is my business and I would find the argument for Plymouth much more convincing if it were based on a sounder economic case. For example,
here's an analysis by VIABLE from a couple of months back which purports to show that a £10 Airport Development Fee would have made PLH profitable. The problem is that they assume that increasing the cost of a flight by £10 has zero impact on demand, i.e. that demand for air travel to/from Plymouth is completely price-inelastic. Hmm.
