Interesting topic
Just musing your point fairdealfrank, about the UK having so many connections to other countries' hubs - AMS, DuB especially. Amazing that the Government in the UK appears happy to strangle their own businesses with air tax while wilfully handing over good business to other grateful recipients outside the country.
Agreed, and it's not just the recent nonsense with APD, it has much to do with failure to expand LHR when it was needed and the consequential secondary slot market that prices small regional aircraft and all but 2 UK carriers out of LHR
Surely it would make some sense for treasury to super-tax passengers transferring outside the UK economy to foreign hubs and perhaps even use such increased revenues to offset the burden on air routes within the country?
Or is that barking logical?
Probably, but almost certainly illegal within the EU!
Logic doesn't come into it with the EU!
Whatever it may be, it is not practical! UK govts decided to take a laissez faire approach (and were not stopped by anyone) for the last 30 years - the cost of chaning to a 'managed' spproach would now be astronomical.
Difficult to know who could have stopped it. Of course the
laissez faire approach is not quite universal: the market wants LHR expansion yesterday, the govt says "no".
Having encouraged regional airports, they now find that some have been very successful at the cost of the main hub. Some folks may have predicted it and others might say 'unintended consequences' but it is now an established process. It could be changed but only by a very considerable amount of our British Pounds and a political will that does not exist.
Regional airports have been successful with increasing shorthaul point-to-point, thanks to the no frills carriers to a large extent, but point-to-point can't go everywhere.
Much of this has created new opportunities and encouraged new business. Not
all of this has been traffic diverted away from the hub airport.
The hub airport is still required, and longhaul connectivity needs adequate capacity there, and adequate numbers of feeder flights.
Yes, train services between major centres is much imoroved, both in frequency and travel times. However a journey to the nation's hub, LHR, is not always an easy one.
Most train journeys involve changes at stations, most of which do not have lifts, most involve crossing London zone 1 and a couple of tube journeys. that's what lengthend the actual journey over the "headline" journey times.
The govt's rail policy does not involve the provision of a Schiphol-type station at LHR, and maybe one day it will be accessible directly from the west only. Even the airport bus to Watford has stopped, probably because no long distance trains stop there anymore.
So the ability to check baggage at a local airport and transfer to the world via LHR
could be more appealing than some are willing to accept. People in other parts of the UK doing business in the Thames Valley may also be attracted by not having to spend a couple of awkward hours faffing around on onward travel down from London.
However without LHR rwy expansion in our lifetimes, it is pure speculation, irrespective of any point of view.