Luton
 

Shannon - Luton is operated daily with a Luton based aircraft.

Cancelling Shannon - Luton therefore gives Luton extra capacity, not Shannon :confused:

Shannon's TWO new routes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays have nothing to do with the Shannon to Luton route being axed.

Relax lads,
you still have Aer Lingus. 9 euro fares simply were not economical and were only provided to push out the competition ,it was never going to last and you knew it.

I agree that there was overcapacity on the Shannon - London routes.

But now we may be facing undercapacity:

Easyjet -> Gone!
Ryanair -> Axing Luton (uncertainty about possible reductions in Gatwick and Stansted)
Aer Lingus -> Reduced winter schedule.

Mostly, I just am disappointed to see a competitor such as Easyjet bow out, and then also the Luton route lost :(

What has gone wrong at NOC with regard to LGW? I mean surely there is demand for atleast 1 carrier on that route? Having flown with Easyjet on 2 return trips I knew it was'nt going to last for ever, but surely there is enough to sustain RYR atleast on that route? :confused:

Anyone know anything about the service to/from Minsk each week into SNN?

Does it transfer pax onto another service further westbound, or do the pax have SNN as their destination?

Just curious, as it seems like a strange routing to me - though I believe that some CIS-type airlines have operated to SNN in the past where pax have connected onwards.

That was just stupid kicking easyJet out and adding frequencies just to keep airlines away. Then decreasing them when they go.

Well if Stelios is smart he should start to EINN and EICK from Luton, if they keep the costs down I think they have a chance.:)

Belavia have been operating Shannon-Minsk for a number of years with a mixture of 737s and T154s. I think the primary reason at this time of the year is the ongoing arrangement where the Chernobyl's Children's Project bring kids to Ireland to be cared for by Irish families giving the children an opportunity to escape the radioactive area they live in for a brief few weeks.

RE SNN-LTN seems more like a plan to me :)

After all, POC picked up the pieces in CWL post-FR.

MarkD

I would be surprised if Aer Arann were to introduce SNN - LTN. They have so far not introduced ORK - LTN with Cork being one of their main bases, and the ORK - LTN route is currently unserved. Surely they would introduce ORK - LTN ever before SNN - LTN.

In any case it seems to be their policy not to fly from Irish airports to London if there is already a big boy on the route. They only serve Luton from Galway and Waterford where they have a monopoly on the London service.

AA is "realigning" services to Shannon. BOS-SNN with 752 to be discontinued at the end of October, and replaced by ORD-SNN-DUB with a 763.

I wonder if the AA Boston service is just gone for the winter, with the Dublin flight operating through Shannon to satisfy the stopover rule. Maybe it will be back next summer?

transatlantic at Cork
 

Isn't the bilateral due to become 1 SNN for every 3 DUB from November.Could DUB be about to get some extra routes?

re@ Extra DUB routes.
 

ryan2000

Hope this is indeed the case, however only rumours areound at the moment is the NW are to land with 757's to Detroit.

Unfortunately, the transition to 3:1 is dependant on the EU/US bilateral. If that doesn't happen - and it looks very dicey right now, due to US legislative obstacles, the Irish mini-deal can't come into effect ... The govt says it's going to try and negotiate a deal (not necessarily on the same lines as the Irish/US deal) to come into effect for the Summer, but how willing the EU Commission is to allow this, or indeed (given an election next Summer) how willing the govt will be to actually get a deal remains to be seen.

There is still a chance that a deal can be done at the Council of Europe meeting in Vienna in October, which will allow the EU/US deal to come into effect. Let's hope that happens.

I hope this ''mini-Irish'' deal comes into effect sooner rather than later. The fact is AA wanted to fly ORD-DUB, and had to start another route to Shannon to allow ORD-DUB to operate direct! No airline will want to fly to Dublin if it has to fly somewhere else to allow direct flights ex Dublin. In the future, AA may keep Shannon as a summer only route, but AA from DUB is apparently doing very well, and shoudnt have to be routed through SNN!

AA - SNN - ORD - DUB
 

What would happen with this flight if it was fully booked up with passangers who wnated to fly to dublin, ie if there was no one on the flight that was disembarking at SNN, would there just be a touch n go at SNN or does the aircraft have to be on stand for a certain amount of time?

Even in that situation, unfortunately, they would have to stop. Passenger or airline convenience has nothing to do with it. Indeed, one could argue that if you ever want an answer to a question about the stopover and what it requires, think of the logical, convenient commonsense response ... and go in completely the opposite direction. :ugh:

Remember when EI was flying to MCO, they didn't want to stop at all, but just to stop long enough to cool the brakes. EI wasn't even selling tickets from SNN-MCO.

The irony is that the loser is/was SNN; back in the bad old days of Maire Geoghegan Quinn, an argument was made that if direct DUB flights were allowed, SNN would benefit, because all the space on SNN bound/originating pax would be available to SNN pax, but the SIGNAL/pro-stopover crowd were having none of it. It was sheer dog-in-a-manger stuff; SIGNAL even had posters in MGQ's Galway-West constituency (she was re-elected on a knife edge) and the message got through. The Dublin lobby used logic and economic reality to push their message, but the Shannon lobby was able to get people out on the streets; that's what won.

I think that, now, the govt knows this has to change, but I still have a fear that they will be willing to surrender to the EU with only limited struggle and then present the excuse that "they wouldn't let us", notwithstanding the importance to EI's privatisation. We'll see, but it's hard to be confident.

Shannon handout
 

Dublin would be a massive hub today were it not for this Dog in the Manger attitude.

Problem is that Dublin and Cork lobby just aren't as driven as the SNN people. They know they're on a gravy train and they want the hidden subsidies and state handout to be passed on to another generation.

When Seamus B. was minister, he said he was going to look at the possibility of flights from ORK to the US, but I never heard what happened there; did the proposed new mini bilateral provide for this, in the interim period (presumably, if it comes into being, it will be possible after 2008). With US carriers converting 757s for t/a use and always looking for new t/a destinations, it might just be possible - or indeed, what about CO's newly ordered 737-900ERs?

You're right about DUB's potential. Having been involved in the whole stopover issue since the early 1990s, one of the most frustrating aspects has been the casual approach at govt level to letting opportunities flow away, as if like sand through their fingers; as long as they didn't upset the SNN lobby, everything else was expendable and this at a time when unemployment was in the mid to high teens and a country like Ireland could ill afford (as if we can now, either) to throw away chances for new growth.

How has Dublin potential to be a hub? Manchester is less than twenty minutes flight time and has a far greater catchment area. To my mind it would make much more sense. Dublin has been ignored but i think it would be better to concentrate on the development of it's TA and Eastern long haul routes than to realistically hope for hub status.