Maybe I am being Captain Obvious, but no wonder the chaos at the airport in the mornings...
Just looked on the departures board, between 5.30am and 9am this Saturday and there are exactly 50 flights departing from the airport and 21 arriving, using the existing infrastructure.
Using some rather crude calculations and basing each flight carrying 180 passengers, that 9000 passengers departing and 3780 passengers arriving!
That just puts things into perspective, for me!
While those figures are just an estimate, I have based it on the vast majority of flights being the A320 carrying this number of passengers. I appreciate there are a number of A319's operating from the airport that carry fewer passengers, but you also have an increasing number of A321's, also the 757's and 737-800's which hold more passengers. Also at this time of year on a summer Saturday, nearly all these flights will be flying out full.
Does anyone know what the existing infrastructure is designed to handle on an hourly basis, I assume it is far less than this!