Maybe CityJet could take a look at Geneva this winter and follow on to Nice next summer!
2 long established Aer Lingus routes that no longer operate that could suit CityJet with their smaller jets.

If they can make westeen France work profitably then Nice should do very well and FR dropped it up the road this year. Lisbon is another route.

Looks like the only Ski options this year are Austria, using the Salzburg flight. Neither Topflight or Crystal have anything else for sale ex ORK. I'd have imagined that as the economy improved Ski holiday demand would increase. My imagination is clearly overactive.

It's odd that Nice and GVA don't work, BRU either. Here's hoping DUS hangs around.

Is there any news or rumblings on the EIR programme for the Winter? Will the third AT7 and the increased frequencies and routes continue?

Brian, staying for winter operating SNN-EDI, ORK-SOU and extra ORK-MAN, GLA and NCL.

Looks like LBA will not operate, it needed a FRI/SU schedule to really work I think.

I did think LBA might be for the chop. I've used it half a dozen times. The loads have been around the 30 mark each time. Fares seem a bit cheaper than MAN as well. As you say the operated days don't seem quite right.

Unfortunately that report is riddled with Agenda and offers no valuable information.

"96% felt that it was important to have US routes from Cork and Shannon Airports"

This in no way relates to Norwegian at Cork and deliberately evades people wishing to express their discontent at Norwegian horrible labour laws.

With this being a forum for professionals, its quite surprising that so many users are in favour of a further destruction of working conditions for their hobby.

From the actual article.
and
280 people from the 1004 surveyed were from the province of Munster.

Says it all really.

ORKBOS will operate, I believe. I have no idea if it is economically viable, but for Norwegian it is a political necessity. I suspect pent-up demand will keep it going for 12-18 months, a few times a week. Which will probably be long enough for Norwegian to quietly cancel the route.

The EIR schedule for the winter doesn't look quite complete. Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons are light, there are a few slots through the rest of the week. The evening MAN doesn't operate on Tue, Thu and Sat, neither does GLA (GLA does operate on Tue mid-morning though).

BHX - 13 weekly (2x daily ex Sat) & BHX-SNN Daily ex Sat
BRS - 7 Weekly
EDI - 7 Weekly & EDI-SNN Daily ex Sat
GLA - 5 Weekly
MAN - 18 Weekly
NCL - 3 Weekly
SOU - 4 Weekly

There's plenty of room too add more services, or increase frequencies. It would be easy to add SNN-GLA 3x weekly, increase MAN to 21 weekly and still offer LBA 2-3 weekly, based on the remaining gaps. I hadn't realised SNN-GLA had been chopped. Was it a flyBe route?
SOU must be doing very well, 4x weekly in its first winter is a good show, I think.

SNN-GLA was originally an EIR route but they dropped it in favour of a higher frequency to EDI. Flybe did operate it more recently but it didn't last long as it had poor loads.

I'm also skeptical about whether ORK-BOS could work year-round on point-to-point traffic. I can certainly see summer demand there, but through the Winter, it will need strong business take-up and while the service might be handy for EMC and Boston Scientific, the rest of the list of US multi-nationals in Cork is made up of companies where a connecting flight would be needed - Apple (California), Pfizer (New York), Johnson & Johnson (New Jersey), McAfee (California), VMWare (California), Amazon (Washington).

The survey is as good as useless as it has no bearing on what decisions will get made. However, 280 people from Munster in a sample of just over 1,000 Irish people is about right.

CAA stats are very late coming out for April, so it's hard to see what kind of start the new UK routes are getting [I know it's numbers, not yield, but it's the best information those of us with limited access to confidential figures can get].

Daytime flights.

Good for point-to-point, but further emphasising that this would not be a service that catered to west-coast based multi-nationals.

Those times are impossible, so I would not worry about them too much.

Those times are perfect for the likes of me.:ok:

Actually that's true.

The ORK-BOS time is just about doable, but the BOS-ORK is 4+ hours too short.

It also wouldn't tie up with the aircraft operating to Barcelona.

Also, daily?

The timings for BOS-ORK do seem a bit off, but hopefully encouraging that they are still interested in the route. Daily seems very ambitious though, so we'll have to see.

Finally, the provisional CAA stats for April are out (in July!)

Apr 16 Apr 15 Change
ORK-LGW 9748 10207 -4.4%
ORK-LHR 30883 32078 -3.7%
ORK-LCY 6171
ORK-STN 0 28558
ORK-BHX 6055 6450 -6.1%
ORK-BRS 3508 3477 0.8&
ORK-CWL 972
ORK-EDI 3077 3377 -8.8%
ORK-GLA 1838 2050 -10.3%
ORK-JER 39
ORK-LBA 670
ORK-LPL 6300 6371 -1.1%
ORK-MAN 8123 6851 18.5%
ORK-NCL 796 1600 -50.5%
ORK-SOU 1356

SOU seems to be off to a flying start, LBA quite a bit weaker. Im not sure about the NCL figures, all the figures from NCL seem to be -50% or so, so its probably incorrect. STN is also, clearly, incorrect. Unless no-ones told Mick he's flying empty 738s....

Other than MAN there seems to be a 5-10% decline in traffic across the UK routes. We know that the LCY flight has since been terminated and the figures showed no sign of improving very much. I still think it might have been worth a punt at 2x daily, but WX clearly feel otherwise. It may be that the cityJet purchase of Stobart gives them a way to operate their network as Aer Lingus Regional, which may change things, but I think its probably unlikely.

April last year benefited more from the timing of Easter I expect.

Cork-Dusseldorf handled 2137 passengers in May, not sure of the amount of sectors flown but a good start none the less, the load factor must be somewhere around 75-80%.