I heard this morning that Easyjet have pulled one aircraft from SEN as a protest of lack of attention in rectifying the state of the taxiways. They will only go back up to 5 if SEN sorts it.
An interesting story if true. I had speculated myself whether the base reduction could be EZY playing hardball with SEN but I would have guessed the major bone of contention reason was the lack of progress in dealing with the trees affecting the RW24 RTOW, because of the economic implications. On the other hand the taxiway situation is entirely within SEN's hands to rectify whereas the tree situation will be more complex.
I see that the deficiencies of taxiway B no longer appear as a NOTAM item but can be found in the Textual Data section of the AIP. This does not bode well for chances of early rectification.
Taxiway C meets the minimum width requirements for a Code 3C airport and for A320 and B 737 operation but as I understand it will have to be realigned eventually to comply with current requirements. Also centreline lighting will be required for the whole length to avoid the need for a leader vehicle in Low Visibility Procedures. I would have thought the need is not yet considered pressing given the low volume of movements.
This may also be the reason why no one is taking the responsibility of updating the aerodrome manual etc which is way out of date as mentioned in a previous post.
They better be careful of that knock on the door from the CAA.
Fortunately the SEN entries in the AIP are now kept up to date and I am sure that is all that is needed to satisfy the CAA. The website is a different matter. Failings like this (and sadly this is not untypical) create a bad impression of competence to potential customers. It does a very poor job of promoting SEN as an attractive airport that customers will want to use. SEN really needs to take a hard look at other airports' websites and come up with a more professional and better focused offering.