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Old 18th Jul 2015, 14:43
  #2437 (permalink)  
Suzeman
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Suzeman, My point is that this should have been worked on 5 years ago. Just imagine working at MAN and showing up for work at 2pm when your shift started at 8am. I am sure your boss would be displeased if you told him the 369 bus is very busy in the morning and GMT asked you to use it in the afternoon. Same for the airlines and their pax.
I agree this should have been looked at some time ago and maybe it was, but wasn't progressed for some reason. We don't know

My point was that you were saying
big pretty picture announcement a few months ago and now the airlines are just commenting.
, which is not correct as Shed and I have pointed out. The airlines have been involved for some time.

I'm afraid your analogy about peak and off peak using the example given is only part of the picture. For sure if you are travelling on business you need flights at convenient times to allow you to do business; to Europe say an early out and a late back for example. Every travel mode has a peak period because of this.

However the big proportion of Manchester's passengers are travelling for leisure reasons and so can be more flexible, so airlines do have more potential on these routes for off-peak operations and maybe therefore to increase frequency.

Here's the off peak period for passenger charges from the current fees and charges book

In order to qualify for the PFC Off-Peak Rate an Airline must:-

a) operate a minimum of one Service each Week for 52 weeks of a Year, and

b) ensure that the departure of the Aircraft in the Off-Peak Periods 05:30 to
05:59, 06:30 to 06:59, 13:00 to 13:29, 19:00 to 19:59 and 22:00 to 22:59
achieves the applicable QC Ratings shown in the table at Section 1.7
So there is potential there for airlines to operate at a reduced charge with the idea of using the terminals when there is some spare capacity.

The ACL scheduling process should ensure that terminal capacity is not overloaded; however once you have declared a capacity it is very difficult to reduce it in future years because major work is taking place or processes such as security requirements have changed; in this case someone is going to lose a slot and I don't think that is covered in the slot regulations?

So short term management methods can be used to operate known congestion points in the terminals and / or service standards can be reduced. Not sure what is going on this summer, but there seem to be some whinges on here although the MEN has been quite quiet so far!

Terminal capacity planning and management is incredibly complex and no day ever turns out as planned. The trick is to have a series of measures in place which can kick in when required.

It would seem that the next few years will see if they are up to this challenge
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