Trislander,

Quote 'but in all seriousness, the terminal is a bit mickey mouse and with regards to pax inbound to BOH, who wants to fly there?'

You only have to book on a Ryanair flight to see that there is always a mix of nationalities on the flights. I flew to Gerona airport to visit Barcelona for Easter and can honestly tell you that a good 30% of the flight were Spanish nationals.

Bournemouth is one of the leading UK locations for the teaching of English and we have a number of large financial institutions based here. Chase Manhatten, Portman Building society as well as most of the UK banks and insurance companies have major International offices here.
Poole also has a number of high tech firms based there.

Re the terminal. The airport already has planning permission for a new building capable of handling 1.5million but they will have to re submit plans for a larger building now.

Regarding Flybe. They were not a serious loco outfit until the Buzz event. Now I beleive they are the third largest in Europe and seem to be opening a base in every corner of the UK. More power to them and I hope they aren't spreading themselves too thin.

Nakata77 in highlighting this shortcoming of SOU hits the 'nail on the head' in that if you want to develop a reliable service at any airport whereby customers who book to fly through it - whether business or leisure - can book with a 95% probability of doing so, you have to offer an 'all weather' facility, unless like Prestwick for example, your weather record is such that fog is an infrequent occurrence.

SOU really needs to upgrade its existing ILS to at least Cat 1 and arguably Cat 3, and the VOR/DME approach onto the other runway is frankly, a relic of a bygone non-precision approach era.

BOH needs also, to do the same although the weather record as regards fog at BOH is much better than SOU (no river running along the airport boundary, for a start!).

The fact that a significant number of airlines' aircraft using SOU are not even Cat 2 equipped currently, gives SOU a 'get out' but eventually, it'll catch them out.

However, to upgrade to Cat 2 or Cat 3 would cost ££££s as the runway would need new lighting, there would be a requirement for new approach lighting, and the taxiways would need full 'low visibility lighting' (which they don't at present have). So the cost in terms of a business case probably doesn't stack up.

BOH would also need to upgrade much of its airfield ground lighting infrastructure but given the better weather record, the business case is even less viable!

As a frequent business traveller, living with the magic 90 minutes drive of SOU, BOH (just) and LHR (also LTN and BRS) I choose reliability followed by cost as my criteria, hence I fly from LHR or LTN depending on the ticket prices, my destination and the flight availability although I do also use SOU in the summer months when I know that there's a 95% probability of getting to my meetings on time and getting back home again without being diverted.

My only complaint about SOU (and LHR) are the car parking costs!

:}

Ebeneezer,

I think you make your point well but BAA Southampton are up against it right now as it a bad time to be holding out the begging pot as most of the BAA's spare cash is poured into T5 and the kind of sums required to bring SOU up to scratch would be very difficult to find in the present climate. Having said that SOU will reach the point in the next 12-18 mths where they may well have to make serious investment in the airfield and not just the terminal or they could end up being victims of their own success where airlines wish to fly into SOU but cannot be accommodated either because of wx, a/c size, stand parking etc etc etc. Come on SOU !!!!!