Originally Posted by
LEEDS APPROACH
I think you are massively overcomplicating matters re EMA. The airport has fantastic private transport accessibility but its population catchment, although not that small, is fairly finite and confined. In other words the exact location of the airport on the M1 could not be better to ideally serve its catchment area population- it literally gets the absolute best from its relatively small geographic catchment. The reason why its passenger growth has slowed in recent years is because it has come under attack from the South with BHX's greater efficiency due to runway extension [runway extensions do NOT just mean ability to handle bigger aircraft]. Greater efficiency = lower costs and these lower costs suck passengers out of the East Midlands to BHX. The other main reason is that it has come under attack from the North and DSA. Many hundreds of thousands of passengers from South Yorkshire have traditionally used EMA because of the ease and time of getting there. This number has obviously reduced as DSA seeks to establish itself. Would it not have been better for EI to have more flights from one of the airports rather than divide the flights between 2 airports?
The real question that should be asked is are MAG really that interested in taking DSA on? If EMA wanted to beat DSA they, on a level playing field, could. EMA has the bigger population catchment. In other words why are BE flying daily from DSA to CDG when they could so from the larger population East Midlands? Forget sustainability - It's all to do with the deals these days.
Don't entirely agree with you the catchment being heavily leisure orientated. Among other major employers are Rolls Royce, Boots, Toyota, Expedia and Capital One all of whom ought to have a requirement to fly to meetings in Europe and further afield. I actually think that pre-MAG ownership the management were more interested in courting a big low cost operator, and paid too little attention to the business and commerce requirement of the region.
As for the private transport accessibility I would question that. J24 of the M1 is a total pig in a poke, and the planners have managed to allow major events at Donington park, both car and motorcycle racing as well as things like Download which make getting to the airport on time on some weekends something of a lottery. For that reason, I'd certainly think twice about flying from EMA on a summer weekend - or for that matter, any Friday evening when again, the M1 is often snarled up back as far as J21 northbound due to "sheer volume of traffic" which is a euphemism for rank bad infrastructure planning.