Dannyboy 39, I'm not even going to bother differing on your view. You live in Luton and are quite clearly an 'anti-Stansted' person as pamann quite nicely put it. All I will say is that 80% is very impressive for the entire year as an average and load factors are climing at Stansted despite passenger declines, clearly showing the demand is there. Considering the less than half full planes that most airports get outside the peak seasons, 80% for the whole year is very impressive and suggests virtually full, if not completely full planes operating through the summer and it's LF's are actually now above Gatwick's!
(Luton is good for a lot of London + Oxford/Buckinghamshire & Gatwick has South London + Kent, Surrey/Sussex, Hampshire)
Stansted is probably the first choice airport for all those North and East London, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk with parts of Northamtonshire also. Even a good amount of people from where I live in Leicester (in the Midlands!) use Stansted easily as much as Luton despite being half an hour further away by road and are both on direct rail routes but Luton is much faster in that sense. Yet despite that, everybody I have asked round here say they still prefer Stansted! Now what could possibly be the explanation to that???