Stansted continuing to close in on MAN's 3rd place in the UK rankings too. They'll presumably pass MAN this summer.
You may be in for a surprise there. STN's growth is all about Ryanair with a much smaller contribution from EasyJet. RYR anticipates capacity growth of 6.17% at STN this Summer season. In recent seasons preceding this their capacity increases had been much larger. EasyJet's programme at STN appears stable but not in stellar-growth mode - capacity is +4.82%. Between them, those two carriers represented 93% of all passenger throughput at STN quite recently. This Summer STN has added a programme with BA Cityflyer (21K seats), Onur Air (78K seats), Eurowings (78K seats), Thomson increase (18K seats), Thomas Cook increase (54K seats), STP Airways (35K seats) [who they?]. Cutbacks include FlyBe (-122K seats) and Germanwings (-34K seats).
Meanwhile, at MAN, the ACL start-of-summer report indicated a 13.1% increase in seat capacity ex-MAN for S2016 season. Realistically, one or two further adjustments will follow ... some remaining programmes to Egypt / Turkey were annotated 'TBC'; a 'paper airline' is listed for services to LCA; Pegasus was showing daily to SAW which remains to be seen, and a specialist tour operator to Turkey has recently ceased trading. So let's call MAN's likely seat-capacity increase for S2016 +12%.
Comparing the respective start-of-season S16 reports, STN is showing +1,043,354 seats [+6.3%]; MAN is showing +2,454,872 seats [+13.1%]. Both of these figures are likely to be adjusted slightly downwards for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph. But based on projections, MAN is anticipating growth in seat capacity of more than twice that of STN for the season through to the end of October 2016. We must wait to see how load factors respond. What happens beyond Summer 2016 season remains to be seen.