I think you may be wasting your time and effort Shed with some of the naysayers. As an aside, I'm not sure why a regular contributor on the BHX thread, who posts only very occasionally on here, should be telling us what we should and should not be discussing. I wouldn't dream of doing that on the BHX thread despite making the odd post.
If all we did was wait for LAX to tell us what had appeared on GDS by way of expected new routes or extra frequencies, or for an official announcement in the M.E.N. of a route starting, welcome though those are, it would be pretty quiet for long periods.
Even if we are 'allowed' to discuss the prospects for say, Ryanair expansion, how could this be done sensibly without consideration of capacity constraints by way of immigration resources or available stands? (a point Shed has raised).
On the topic of routes, should we be concerned that LPL has a new route to Bucharest - a destination which in my view should be available from MAN - that CSA are starting Prague and, just recently, that flybe have announced AMS 3 x daily? It seems highly unlikely that they will attract completely new pax which surely means there will be some impact on MAN.
For the sake of argument, suppose the flybe service attracted 100,000 pax a year to LPL that were not new pax (is that realistic?). That equates to about 2.5% of LPL's annual throughput. It's only about 0.5% of MAN's annual total, but compared to seat capacity for this summer which is only up 1.3%, it is not insignificant. I appreciate the LPL route only starts Sep.
So, a couple of questions:-
What are the code sharing arrangements if any with KLM for the two airports?
Do we think flybe will continue the MAN-AMS route, and how has it performed so far?
I recognise this may be considered by some to be mere speculation and therefore not permitted, in which case please skip this post.