Actually the airports commision came the conclusion that it was the hub business model that made Heathrow the winner as Gatwick could not come close to delivering the economic benefits.
But Heathrow cannot come close to matching Gatwick's cost of project-delivery. Both sides of the ledger must be carefully considered.
The Manchester Crowd really do love to be selective
It is yourself who keeps
conflating MAN's role with SE capacity debate. There is no logical reason for MAN to be central to this discussion.
MAN and flybe feeding TCX, the ME3, VS building a hub. This is a good hub because it's their local hub.
Please refer to my earlier comments about MAN being suitable to serve only as a niche-hub due to its geographical location on the western periphery of Europe and the absence of a major based hub-carrier. However, any transfer traffic which can be attracted within these limitations is a net positive ...
icing on the cake, if you like. This would not apply if MAG needed to spend GBP2Bn to attract GBP100M of new business. The maths has to work. No exceptions.
A bad hub is one in another part of the country which may impact the rate of growth at MAN.
A bad hub is one at which the cost of attracting incremental business vastly outweighs the financial benefits of the new business so attracted. A good hub is one at which transfer traffic can be handled on a complementary basis with either no or modest additional investment required for supplementary facilities. In all cases, the value of new trade attracted must exceed that investment cost by a worthwhile profit margin.
I would say that Manchester is a spoke rather than a hub! While it chases the likes of Ryanair, easyJet, Jet2 et al it will never became alternative to Heathrow.
Yes, MAN is predominantly a P2P airport with scope for a modest niche-hub role at the margins (linking FlyBe destinations to points beyond MAN, for example). MAN is not a solution for passenger demand inherent to the SE market; it cannot serve as an alternative to LHR and has no pretensions of doing so. MAN's role is to serve as principal gateway airport for the 22 million people located within its own catchment area, and overseas customers visiting this hinterland. That role - accounting for some 25 million pax this year - is MAN's raison d'etre and growing this constitutes a suitably significant mission to be getting on with.
The airport is already almost full to capacity at peak times so how would they expect to "accommodate" any overflow from Heathrow?
Simple. They won't! And they have no aspiration to do so. Absolutely unrealistic. MAN's only relevance to this debate is that it is the optimal solution for North of England traffic, including that which was previously obliged to route involuntarily via LHR and other SE airports.
Finally, Skip / All ... May I suggest that it may be appreciated by readers of this SE airports capacity discussion if you stop pitching questions about Manchester Airport on this Heathrow thread. They don't belong here, and it is
you, not those you refer to as the "Manchester Crowd" who is constantly manoeuvring to conflate the topics.
BTW, you'll be pleased to note that since our exchanges a couple of days back I've been inundated with pop-up ads for
Subway. There's some darned clever technology monitoring the net! :-)