How have I contradicted myself? If you had the simple respect to read my post you would find my clear explanation for this, this near death is doing the airport no favours. At all.

AerRyan, you have a funny sense of humour if that is the case.

Sad to see VLM end operations, a great bunch of people working there I wish them the very best in the future.

If only the defensiveness of people on this thread was replicated by the Waterford populace buying tickets ;)

12 airport operations staff/firefighters to start strike action from wednesday next week in relation to hours been cut.

The airport has lost all passenger ops ffs, do they expect to be paid full hours to sit around and do absoutley nothing for all of them?

Yes your correct the airport is extremely quite at the moment. The issue with the guy's going on strike is fairness in the hours being cut that it is not spread across all employment of the airport. The 12 guy's are being cut from 39hrs to 21. Supervisors from 35hrs to 33hrs. Front Desk staff from 39 to 31. Management will not reveal what cut's they are on but you could only expect that it is very much. If the cut across the board was 21hrs then I don't think people could say too much but when 1 group are cut so much all of the time and the rest only lose a small amount of hours then that is not right.

Have there been any more rumours on talks with carriers to replace VLM on the LTN and BHX routes?

The best result that could be achieved right now is for a return of Stobart Air on the Luton route if and when the Cityjet merger / takeover goes ahead. Free of the Stobart linkage and the demand to serve Southern gone, Aer Lingus branding is the vehicle that could deliver something good.

One assumes that a new larger Cityjet would have capacity given new ac orders etc. Again very much depends on the airlines priorities.

On another forum there seems to be constant rumours of services but I'd say its nothing more than hot air.

We shall wait and see so. :ok: ;)

180 movements at the airport Saturday, reckon the runway will still close next April? :rolleyes: :O

You shall.

Its not whether I "reckon" or not, that's the word I heard, and its not up to me to speculate about it.

It would be great to see CityJet take over Stobart and remove the ridiculous requirement for them to HAVE to use Southend. Whilst it may offer opportunities it certainly proved the death knell for WAT which was doing just fine as LTN-WAT with RE until Stobart came along and messed with things.

If CityJet can come in and make the route doable using the EI brand then everyone wins. Fingers crossed

Would be good alright, and hopefully would end this hop to hop that WAT has been doing with carriers lately.

A380's or C172's.:E

Bit of a difference in terms of charges.:=

Now if they had that many C172's every day then they would be sorted.

WAT-LTN used to work well and it would be great to see a successful WAT-LTN come back.

Just a word of caution, though: WAT-LTN was back in the days when LTN was a significant station on Aer Arann's network, and a WAT route fitted in well to that network: aircraft could be rotated around, brought back to Galway for maintenance, etc. Today neither Cityjet nor Stobart (nor Aer Lingus as the potential franchisor) has scheduled service to LTN, so either WAT-LTN would be operating completely isolated from the rest of the airlines' networks (leading to positioning flights, higher costs, etc) or the airline would have to launch other services from LTN.

I agree with the desirability of WAT-LTN with Cityjet/Stobart, but I have to say that it's not nearly as operationally feasible as it was a few years ago, so it's very far from being a no-brainer for a airline such as Cityjet or Cityjet/Stobart.

Aren't BA going to do some class of hopping sectors etc from LCY/STN. The STN aircraft are partially based in LCY. (so is there a major commercial issue - yes increasing rotations etc. but initially the airline would get to test the market).

For WAT - LON to work - it has to be double daily weekdays to compete against Dub/ORK from a business perspective. So allowing for 1.5 hour sectors X 4 plus an 30 mins on the ground in WAT/LON depending - you are looking at perhaps 4 hours gone on a morning and again similar on an evening. Maybe 7am to 11am - aircraft then tackles a European route midday and is back for the evening operation at 17.00 until 1900. (Which I think was pretty close to VLM's timings). Yield - well - Cork and Dublin close to departure days is not cheap. So surely there's a decent yield to be harnessed. So hopefully someone out there will give this a crack.

Regards
Shamrogue

Waterford, Ireland 'in talks' with new airline
 

Yet another airline to be added to the list of failures.

@Shamrogue: BA's "STN" aircraft are just LCY aircraft taking a break during the 24h they can't fly from LCY because it's shut.

Press release for 1300 - aer southeast are finally ready for take off ...