I can only assume that one of Stobart's thoughts on SEN-MAN was that it would enable them to offer some very good onward connections for SEN catchment pax and for travellers on existing inbound flights to SEN such as GRQ and ANR. That's a sound argument and I'll think you will find that ABZ, BHD, IOM, EXT and, particularly, EDI are already attracting bookings. The problem is that the route is only viable if point-to-point traffic is sufficient to require the 3 x daily service that you really need to make the connection options attractive.
I've flown NWI-MAN mid-week on the D328 when there were 8 pax northbound and 11 coming back so even from a city where rail travel to MAN takes about 5 hours the demand for air travel is weak. The prospect of attracting pax from London to travel to MAN via SEN in any numbers seems unlikely to me simply because the first departure has no London train connection. MAN-SEN has greater possibilities where the only other air option involves arriving at LHR and still requiring a train journey into the City. Any promotion of the route should perhaps be focused at that market. I suspect that a large number of pax on the BA MAN-LHR route are connecting onwards from LHR.
To sum up, that's a lot of capacity to fill, initially at least, for the potential market is quite small and most will still find train travel more convenient and without excellent public surface transport to SEN the cards are stacked against you even further. It's obviously too early to make any judgements yet but things seem to be shaping up much as I anticipated.
Last edited by Expressflight; 3rd Nov 2017 at 19:06.