Originally Posted by
anothertyke
The figures need to be looked at carefully and interpreted. Just a few points.
The 2011 Census had the population of W Midlands Planning Region at 5.6 million not 5.3m.
Birmingham is also the most attractive airport for a chunk of surrounding territory outside WM such as mid-Wales, N Oxfordshire. By contrast even CF would not be clearly the best located airport for Sheffield,certainly not the affluent parts of Sheffield.
Looking at Bristol and E Mids as the best comparators to Leeds and looking at the CAA stats, I reckon an all singing all dancing relatively unconstrained airport would be doing a couple of million pppa more than Yeadon. Given that would never be a purely commercial proposition, how much public money is it worth spending to achieve that? A fraction of what it would cost IMHO.
If the airport at CF had been developed when the runway extension at LBA was constructed (combined with the run down of LBA at that time) CF would be doing between 7 and 8 million passengers now (conservative estimate). The point is though go forward 50 years with CF against 50 years with LBA and the loss to Yorkshire without CF would be staggering (but great for MAN).
Politicians will keep an underperforming unsuitable airport bobbling along for as long as they can.