Well done Ryanair me thinks :E but at the end of the day it doesn't matter which airline is being used. A great result for Stansted.

I travelled into Stansted this afternoon at about 13.30, huge queue at immigration, only 1 in 3 of the electronic gates functioning, lines back to transit train from the manual passport checks. The line supervisor at the Electronic gates didn't really seem to care, and stood there with his hands in his pockets.
Not a very nice experience at all, and not one I really appreciated.

Come on Stansted get your act together, abolish queus, make it your 2015 resolution.:=

Hard when it's HM Gov boarder force who decide how many staff to put on, not a stansted management.

Ryanair to feed long haul flights at STN?
 

A suggestion that Ryanair may provide feed for future long haul services out of Stansted:

Ryanair mulls route-sharing with longhaul carriers - Telegraph

Logistically is this possible with the current set-up at STN? And would Ryanair want to pick up the tab for missed connections? It seems bosses at STN need this more than FR does, to reinforce the idea that it can be a viable London hub.

No serious person believes LGW can be a hub for London let alone STN. It's a fantasy.

BAA built the new STN to be *exactly* that and found out you can't buck the market, even less true today in a less regulated environment.

Surely Ryanair would be hoping to do for long haul what they did for short haul and create new markets? I agree that talk of 'hubs' is misleading as a hub only works with 'spokes'.

The numbers don't stack up anywhere as well as they do for short haul, the competitive advantage against the exisiting legacies isn't huge and is hard to scale. That they'd have done it by now is the best clue :)

Stansted has NO long haul , so the obvious place to look at this is Manchester !

I flew STN-CGN on Tuesday 27th and must say that I was pretty impressed on the whole. :ok:

I haven't flown from STN in a long while but the new security area was very good and from arriving off the train to being sat in departures was 10mins. The only downside to this is like most airports these days, you are fighting off the orange faces trying to sell you perfume.

Lots of work going on in the terminal and it was crowded but not a major issue.

Arrival saw us back on 15mins ahead of schedule and within 20mins sat back on the train.

I'm not sure how long CGN has been served by Ryanair but loads were very poor, 38 on the outbound, 29 inbound.

All in all, Stansted gets a :ok: from me and I will certainly be back in the future.

Yet another incredible percentage increase @ Stansted for January....Pax numbers + 28%....Moving 12 month figure now breaches the 20M mark for a total of 20.3M.....

Well done M A G.
 

M A G have done an amazing job,
I only hope that they are getting on with talks between some long haul airlines to add some new and existing destinations to the departure boards.

I hear the the NQY flights with Flybe have been upgraded to daily and I wonder if we can expect anymore routes from Flybe possibly MAN ?

STN-CGN has been served by FR since beginning of the winter timetable - and there is an open fight by various carriers on the DUS/CGN-LON market (and if you so wish you could throw DTM and NRN into the mix). fares are rock-bottom, particularly as LH-Group decided to defend their CGN-STN business with 17Euro one-way fares ex CGN. 4U's lowest is usually 33 Euros across its network portfolio.

On DUS-STN 4U entertained largely empty aircrafts as well since opening the route also for the winter season, but succeeded in fighting off Darwin/AB/Etihad on the DUS-STN route now.

Has capacity actually gone up 20+ %

OR

Were the flights last year simply empty and now they are full again !

FR decided to use their planes for flying during the winter period and not like the last year to ground. That's why we see an increase at STN as well as FR passenger numbers.

True,

But FR are only flying them because there is demand.

I'm kit sure what your point is? Are you saying STN traffic is 'only' increasing because FR are flying more planes and that's a bad thing?

I don't think that Seljuk was drawing any particular inference. It is inarguable that for a number of years Ryanair have grounded a fair number of planes during the winter, and that this winter they have reversed this trend. In part this can be attributed to the economic recovery (ie increased demand) but credit should also be given to MAG, who have entered into a new commercial deal with Ryanair that makes it easier for the airline to turn a profit during the quiet winter months.

Evidently this has shifted the economic balance between keeping aircraft in service year-round and grounding them during the winter.

We should expect to see some reduction in these stellar growth numbers as we move into the summer season. It will be interesting to see at what level the growth rate eventually settles - if STN continues to grow at anything like the present rate it won't be too long before it overtakes MAN again!

Growth will slow in the summer months but should still be significant.

FR will continue growing traffic, BE are coming in, TCX expanding with long-haul flights in July and August plus the odd increase by other airlines.

If only EZY were not continuing to disappoint by cutting flights again this year.

IOM - STN
 

I wouldn't think BE will be great, never seen any direct advertising about in IOM. I think it is only a concession to get better deals at other MAG airports, will it last next year?

Well BE have today increased NQY to daily from May - September so would assume at least that route must be selling well.

I was in Stansted in October on a Friday and it was fairly empty. The last time I was there before that were tons of planes like one taking off every minute.

Will be back in March.. Will be good to see how its improved.