His comments about passenger ops are laughable. He talks up this so called half a million Ayrshire and D&G population area. This would be an area that is economically stagnant, plus its fairly inaccurate. Areas like Dumfries have better access to GLA than PIK. Half a million for a so called regional airport is hardly much to boast about. Its significantly less than the catchment of smaller airports like BOH, EXT, SOU, NWI.
I live in D&G, and for a few people I know PIK is the main airport they use. At the end of the day it comes down to price and destination availability. If the flight they need is available from PIK, and at a good price, they will use the airport.
Having Ryanair there is certainly a bonus - for many people it's the first place they look when booking flights. I'd be curious to know what effect Ryanair experienced when they moved flights from PIK to GLA - how much has demand for those flights changed?
Despite the small population, Stewart quotes that this area made 1.6 million trips in 2013. That's a lot of business for the airport to be targeting, and is certainly enough to sustain some kind of passenger operations, especially combined with a share of the 5.9 million trips made by the central belt catchment area in the same year.
While it will never rival Edinburgh or Glasgow, it may be possible for the airport to carve out a niche passenger market. They should be able to persuade Ryanair to launch a few new flights, and a few charter flights should be viable too.
Glasgow airport would have given Ryanair a good deal to start flights from the airport - these deals typically only last 3 years, before the price rises closer to normal levels. That deal will be coming to an end soon, so we might see a few Ryanair destinations switching back to PIK if they don't get the deal they want from GLA.