Prestwick-3
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Airspace Change Organising Group - Airspace Change Masterplan (Iteration 3) Scotland: Public Engagement Exercise is open for public consultation until 10 March 2024:
https://acog.citizenspace.com/comms/sctma/
Supporting documentation: https://acog.citizenspace.com/comms/...UMENT_2024.pdf
https://acog.citizenspace.com/comms/sctma/
Supporting documentation: https://acog.citizenspace.com/comms/...UMENT_2024.pdf
It is supposedly designed so that it captures all possible consultees and keeps them fully informed and engaged. But in the most recent ACP in my neck of the woods the sponsor didn't bother to consult one of the ATSUs within the area; the CAA didn't pick up that they hadn't been consulted; and said ATSU only found out when they discovered the CAA approval letter. On the same ACP, the sponsor only applied for a change applying to the airspace above FL85, but in the documents submitted in support of the ACP the sponsor explicitly stated that they would also be operating at all levels down to surface level when the new airspace is activated. But were operators in that airspace consulted? No.
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Canadian private equity firm Onex Corporation, owners of WestJet, interested in purchasing the airport.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/g...next-g8lz396h3
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/g...next-g8lz396h3
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Private takeover in the offing?
Reported in 'The Times' that a private takeover bid is being launched by Forsyth Black the airport's former Chairman and the Onex Corporation
one of Canada's biggest private equity funds and the owner of Westjet, Canada's second largest airline. Mr Black was previously CEO of Menzies.
He resigned from his post as Chairman of Prestwick in February after two years reportedly because staying in post would be a clear conflict of interest. It is understood that the company has made a commitment not to cut jobs for the first three years of ownership and to keep running Prestwick as an airport
for at least five years.
one of Canada's biggest private equity funds and the owner of Westjet, Canada's second largest airline. Mr Black was previously CEO of Menzies.
He resigned from his post as Chairman of Prestwick in February after two years reportedly because staying in post would be a clear conflict of interest. It is understood that the company has made a commitment not to cut jobs for the first three years of ownership and to keep running Prestwick as an airport
for at least five years.
Last edited by Monkton3; 16th Mar 2024 at 19:54.
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Bidders circle ‘Elvis airport’ a decade after the SNP bought it for £1
Prestwick has cost taxpayers millions since it was nationalised by the SNP in 2013. A consortium plans a bid, but can the Nats let go of Sturgeon-era stateism?
Elvis Presley meets fans at Prestwick airport in 1960 — his sole time on British soilSaturday March 16 2024, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times
It was always going to be difficult keeping a lid on the arrival of Elvis Presley at a US military base in Prestwick, Ayrshire. “Where am I?” he asked as he stepped off the plane and into the biting wind that whipped off the Firth of Clyde.
March 3, 1960 was a momentous day for the screaming youngsters who engulfed the American singer as he set foot on British soil for the first and only time. For Presley, it was his last stop on his return from Germany after two years of military service. For Prestwick, it meant being immortalised in British trivia for its brief flirtation with The King.
Located 34 miles south of Glasgow, Prestwick has attracted further notoriety in recent years for housing Donald Trump’s private jets and helicopters, stationed at the airport to ferry him to the nearby Turnberry golf course. It has not, however, earned a reputation for being a commercial success. Indeed, despite boasting the longest runway in the UK north of Manchester, welcoming as many as 2.5 million passengers annually and charging the US government tens of millions of pounds to refuel military planes, Scottish ministers had to step in and nationalise the loss-making airport in 2013. It has been a drain on British taxpayers ever since.
Donald Trump is a frequent visitor to Prestwick on his way to and from Turnberry golf course
This weekend it can be revealed a private takeover is in the offing — one that will hand Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf the chance to draw a line under more than £55 million of losses for the Treasury racked up since the airport was taken into public ownership by Nicola Sturgeon at a cost of just £1. Whether he will take the chance is as much a political question as it is an economic one.
Sturgeon, deputy first minister at the time, chose to nationalise Prestwick 11 years ago to save 300 jobs, plus 1,400 more among businesses associated with the airport. The logic was straightforward: the economic fallout would be greater than the £21.3 million needed to stabilise the airport’s finances before returning it to the private sector.
“I believe an opportunity now exists to return Prestwick airport to profitability and ultimately to private ownership,” Sturgeon said at the time.
Critics argued that this was little more than a power grab, neatly combining the SNP’s desire for a state-run economy with the airport being a symbol of nationalist pride. Whatever the rationale, Prestwick’s nationalisation quickly became embroiled in political mudslinging as it emerged that the SNP had sanctioned payments of almost £200,000 to the airport’s former directors.
A number of false dawns emerged in the years that followed. On several occasions, ministers claimed they were in talks with unnamed interested parties to take the airport private, only for negotiations to fizzle away.Meanwhile, the Americans boasted they had secured hefty discounts from the Scottish government for the aviation fuel. “At Prestwick we have a negotiated rate, so we actually have a rate that’s significantly lower than the commercial rate,” US official Jonathan Hoffman told reporters in 2019. The discount is unknown — but it is unlikely to be small. In the past six years alone, the US Department of Defense has spent almost £104 million on fuel at Prestwick, filings reveal: equivalent to about £50,000 worth of fuel a day.
It has also been revealed that the cost of bankrolling Prestwick since its nationalisation has ballooned to £55 million, and the interest on a government loan is costing more than £4 million a year.
So, all things being equal, officials are likely to take seriously an audacious takeover bid led by the airport’s former chairman and one of Canada’s biggest private equity funds.
Forsyth Black has quietly resigned his chairmanship of the airport and now heads the bid to buy it
Forsyth Black, the former chief executive of multinational airport refuelling company Menzies, quietly quit as Glasgow Prestwick chairman in February after little more than two years in the job. His resignation letter to Scottish ministers is understood to have included the reason for his departure: namely that he wanted to buy the airport in conjunction with Onex Corporation, the fund behind WestJet, Canada’s second-biggest airline. Black told officials that staying in post as chairman was a clear conflict of interest.
Oddly, the SNP-led administration north of the border has not disclosed Black’s interest, despite having disclosed previous offers to members of the Scottish parliament. Sources close to Black and Onex’s swoop say it includes a commitment to not cut jobs in the first three years of ownership and to keep running Prestwick as an airport — rather than building on it, for instance — for at least five years.
Scottish ministers will rightly be sceptical of the intentions of the airport’s Canadian-backed suitors. The airport covers 880 acres of land on the outskirts of Glasgow ripe for property development.
Prestwick offers significant advantages over Scotland’s two larger airports, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Its long runway means it can handle fully-laden large aircraft such as the Airbus A380 “superjumbo’; the airport already has a dedicated rail link into Glasgow; and it is rarely blighted by fog, unlike many competitors in the UK and Ireland.
Nicola Sturgeon was deputy first minister at the time of the airport’s nationalisation.
Black declined to comment this weekend on why he stepped down as Prestwick chairman. He was likewise tight-lipped on any plans he and his Canadian backers have for the airport. Onex has a pedigree in aviation, however, with its ownership of WestJet. It would not be ridiculous to assume that the carrier could establish Prestwick as a long-haul hub for flights that could head east to Asia.
Yousaf’s approach will be closely watched as a signal for how his administration intends to manage the Scottish economy. The Sturgeon administration was criticised for a raft of bungled economic policies, not least of which was spending more than £200 million to nationalise the Ferguson Marine shipyard.
The Scottish government responded this weekend: “As one of the most recent expressions of interest is linked to Forsyth Black, the then chairman of the board of the airport, it was mutually agreed that Mr Black should step back from the Board to ensure an independent and fair assessment can be made. The Scottish Parliament will be updated when appropriate.”
Yousaf must decide whether to distance himself from Sturgeon’s stateist tendencies, or continue in the same vein. Prestwick may be his proving ground.
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It has some value for non commercial aviation but no doubt the stalemate has been that all prospective buyers have at the very least wanted rid of the passenger terminal let alone to demolish the whole airport and I expect they want some assurances where if the decision is eventually made to move away from commercial passenger ops that the Scottish Gov are far enough removed in time. No private buyer with any sanity is paying to demolish a 60 year old terminal, let alone one filled with asbestos to then privately finance the design and construction of another new one for a few Ryanair flights a week. If the plan is a Westjet hub in Ayrshire knock me over with a feather.
Thanks for posting. A pretty (as expected with The Times) one sided article focusing on the Scottish Government loans (fair comment), Trump (not seen a Trump aircraft in the last couple of years), and the pax ops and terminal which is only a fraction of the overall income. At least they did mention the revenue from military ops and cargo but they fail to mention that the airport has for the fourth year in a row posted an operating profit. OK the loans have not yet been paid back but surely some of any sale will go to paying back at least some of the debt to the Scottish Government. There's no real mention about the impact of the jobs being saved locally or about the associated income to the local economy through income tax, council tax, etc. I would agree that the pax ops are a key concern and with Ryanair being the only scheduled pax operator then the lifespan of the present terminal may be limited albeit with PAM / Ryanair planning another 737 hangar then I would expect pax ops to remain for some time. I still think that the present terminal could be utilised as both a smaller pax terminal and an aerospace museum and given the amazing aeronautical history that Prestwick has a decent museum (with direct rail link) would be an attraction. And yes, I'd be amazed if it became a Westjet hub!
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WestJet Route Planning
Nothing would surprise me with WestJet. Only a year after they retrenched to "fortress" Calgary for all their transatlantic flights, this year they have resurrected flights from Toronto and Halifax and maybe even St John's. They have a code share agreement with Air France through CDG. At Gatwick they have had a partnership with easyJet since 2017. That may now be set aside since their daily 787 now flies into LHR. This year they launched routes to Tokyo and to Seoul from Calgary. They are all over the place with no discernable strategy. A hub at Prestwick linking with a European LCC, who knows?
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Actually I just checked out flight times from Edinburgh to Tokyo and the WestJet offering (via Calgary) is no longer or costlier than many of the more obvious alternatives due to the current war and Russia overflight ban. But I agree. I'm not sure the Scotland to Asia market would be the market to target.
Prestwick should be to Scotland what Concorde was to Britain.
No, I've not lost my mind, hear me out. (I may have lost my mind, that's for others to decide!)
It's an important employer in a region that cannot afford to lose jobs and despite everything, seems to manage an operating profit. Every once in a while, the govt. rightly decides to right debt off, as on balance it makes economic sense. We allowed Concorde to go on and make money for the private sector, PIK could be allowed to do the same. IF and only IF they can continue to make money on non Ryanair activiities, then that's a national asset that we paid to be built out of our taxes, and we should think very carefully about the consequences of closure. The spread of operations is remarkably wide and traffic is seldom dull, and there is a host of engineering and maintenance work on site that need the runway(s) !
If they finally have a working business model and it's not losing money, do the right thing for the wider econoomy and forgive the debt owed.
btw they don't need to turn the 1964 terminal into a museum, it's already there......
There can't be many older terminals than PIK now? GLA is 1966. LGW South (1958, but MUCH expanded and built out) and MAN T1 (1962) are the other survivors of that era and MAN is now approaching end of life. LHR T1 (1969) is still extant of course, but now closed .
No, I've not lost my mind, hear me out. (I may have lost my mind, that's for others to decide!)
It's an important employer in a region that cannot afford to lose jobs and despite everything, seems to manage an operating profit. Every once in a while, the govt. rightly decides to right debt off, as on balance it makes economic sense. We allowed Concorde to go on and make money for the private sector, PIK could be allowed to do the same. IF and only IF they can continue to make money on non Ryanair activiities, then that's a national asset that we paid to be built out of our taxes, and we should think very carefully about the consequences of closure. The spread of operations is remarkably wide and traffic is seldom dull, and there is a host of engineering and maintenance work on site that need the runway(s) !
If they finally have a working business model and it's not losing money, do the right thing for the wider econoomy and forgive the debt owed.
btw they don't need to turn the 1964 terminal into a museum, it's already there......
There can't be many older terminals than PIK now? GLA is 1966. LGW South (1958, but MUCH expanded and built out) and MAN T1 (1962) are the other survivors of that era and MAN is now approaching end of life. LHR T1 (1969) is still extant of course, but now closed .
Vey good post Skipness and I concur with your views. As regards the museum, ha ha, I think you are right but let's try and get some aircraft in it, at the very minimum, an example of each of the aircraft actually built at Prestwick! Anyone know the whereabouts of a SAL Pioneer?
PIK is technically free from 'political control' but as it owned by the Scottish Government, any political element opposed to the Scottish Government (basically Labour and the Tories whose Scottish arms are run from London) will jump on any opportunity to blacken Prestwick's name. The levels of hypocrisy especially from the other Ross and his cronies is really quite remarkable. The business lost by losing the IDF is really only a few transatlantic fuel stops a year and pales into insignificance compared the number of stop overs from the Arab air forces of Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. If you add in the USAF, RCAF and increasing Turkish AF business then from a business perspective its a very small loss albeit a loss all the same. It will be interesting to see where the IDF now stop over to and from the US.
First up, the IDFAF have been through Mildenhall of late.
So "technically free" means "really isn't free after all", so another political "misdirection". It was clearly communicated that commercial decisions were to be made free from political pressure, now they're not. If the US military starts sending flights that Greer and Harvie object to via SNN, MHZ or elsewhere instead, PIK's revenue collapses overnight. Where's your sale then?
And it's not as if those two won't agitate. They've never balanced a budget or tidied their own bedrooms in their angry little lives. The other parties are all just as bad but THEY are not making the decisions, that's Hutchie Grammar's finest and his mates.
So "technically free" means "really isn't free after all", so another political "misdirection". It was clearly communicated that commercial decisions were to be made free from political pressure, now they're not. If the US military starts sending flights that Greer and Harvie object to via SNN, MHZ or elsewhere instead, PIK's revenue collapses overnight. Where's your sale then?
And it's not as if those two won't agitate. They've never balanced a budget or tidied their own bedrooms in their angry little lives. The other parties are all just as bad but THEY are not making the decisions, that's Hutchie Grammar's finest and his mates.
First up, the IDFAF have been through Mildenhall of late.
So "technically free" means "really isn't free after all", so another political "misdirection". It was clearly communicated that commercial decisions were to be made free from political pressure, now they're not. If the US military starts sending flights that Greer and Harvie object to via SNN, MHZ or elsewhere instead, PIK's revenue collapses overnight. Where's your sale then?
And it's not as if those two won't agitate. They've never balanced a budget or tidied their own bedrooms in their angry little lives. The other parties are all just as bad but THEY are not making the decisions, that's Hutchie Grammar's finest and his mates.
So "technically free" means "really isn't free after all", so another political "misdirection". It was clearly communicated that commercial decisions were to be made free from political pressure, now they're not. If the US military starts sending flights that Greer and Harvie object to via SNN, MHZ or elsewhere instead, PIK's revenue collapses overnight. Where's your sale then?
And it's not as if those two won't agitate. They've never balanced a budget or tidied their own bedrooms in their angry little lives. The other parties are all just as bad but THEY are not making the decisions, that's Hutchie Grammar's finest and his mates.
Without the income from the many, many USAF / ANG transit stops, there's no likely sale and we might end up with nice new housing and no airport. And Greer and Harvie would be most pleased, so given their anti-Trump rhetoric, why stop at the Israelis? They're rabidly anti US foreign policy too.