There is a fine line to tread. Aer Lingus and Ryanair are the biggest customers and both airports would be fearful of annoying them. It is a problem that any airport with one or two dominant airlines is going to face.

Swiss
 

LX announced the second weekly flight to Zurich will operate for the full season and not just July/August.

Number of seats grows from 6,750 to 9,000.

Hopefully, that's a good sign for the route. They're still charging ludicrous prices for connecting flights (€2,000 more than from DUB for the same dates even though the ORK-ZRH is only priced around €100 rtn), which is a pity as I would have seen that as a way that Zurich could have been sustained for longer than the summer season. Does anyone know if this is normal for flights operated by Swiss Global rather than Swiss themselves?

Swiss Global is the former Swiss European Airlines. Historically they operated the AVRO fleet, but also operate the 777-300ER fleet and the replacement for the AVRO, which is the C-Series.

Route figures are available from the CSO for the whole of last year now. Not a massive amount to note really. The routes with big growth are those with capacity increases. It does suggest that capacity on UK regional is holding back that part of the business. The silly growth figures are for routes that started up, where there had been a small number of private jet usage previously. I've excluded any route that didn't carry at least 500 pax. Figures are for combined inbound and outbound, although the detailed breakdown is available from the CSO website.


Heathrow (LHR) 390268 (+1.56%)
Stansted (STN) 339657 (+6.14%)
Amsterdam (AMS) 178170 (+2.77%)
Gatwick (LGW) 120691 (+2.20%)
Malaga (AGP) 116907 (+8.65%)
Faro (FAO) 114441 (+35.82%)
Lanzarote (ACE) 97462 (+7.72%)
Manchester (MAN) 91880 (+13.22%)
Paris CDG (CDG) 90842 (+1.00%)
Liverpool (LPL) 80180 (+2.17%)
Birmingham (BHX) 75319 (-2.62%)
Palma (PMI) 52265 (+26.33%)
Bristol (BRS) 38957 (-5.67%)
Wroclaw (WRO) 37781 (-4.94%)
Edinburgh (EDI) 37697 (-4.82%)
London City (LCY) 35773 (+110.29%)
Gdansk (GDN) 30520 (+9.19%)
Tenerife Sur (TFS) 28642 (+31.69%)
Barcelona (BCN) 24830 (+31.85%)
Glasgow (GLA) 23689 (+10.28%)
Alicante (ALC) 23682 (+0.76%)
Las Palmas (LPA) 21353 (+13.33%)
Munich (MUC) 18668 (+3.38%)
Reus (REU) 17885 (+35.78%)
Southampton (SOU) 16528 (+86889.47%)
Newcastle (NCL) 16522 (+26.16%)
Dusseldorf (DUS) 12094 (+75487.50%)
Cardiff (CWL) 11575 (+105.16%)
Bergamo (BGY) 9005 (-0.04%)
Carcassonne (CCF) 8879 (+5.40%)
Bordeaux (BOD) 8809 (+72.69%)
Gerona (GRO) 8372 (+57.28%)
Madrid (MAD) 7263 (+1257.57%)
Lourdes (LDE) 6285 (-6.19%)
Leeds Bradford (LBA) 5982 (+12362.50%)
Salzburg (SZG) 3134 (+2.99%)
Jersey (JER) 2775 (+12.03%)
La Rochelle (LRH) 2662 (-)
Rennes (RNS) 2586 (-1.52%)
Geneva (GVA) 2473 (-15.02%)
Verona (QBS) 1871 (-43.75%)
Nantes (NTE) 1398 (+139700.00%)
Dubrovnik (DBV) 1167 (-34.29%)
Verona (VRN) 987 (+110.00%)
Rovaniemi (RVN) 852 (+10.08%)
Split (SPU) 554 (+50.54%)

On another note, I notice that the Spar shop by Arrivals seems to have gone out of business. It always seemed moderately busy, but I presume the rent was very high.

DY are saying ORK-NY may not happen next year as they believe fully loaded MAX wont make it because of the runway in Cork. They are waiting to see performance data on this years service but on paper NY unlikely.

Its an extra 250km.

Blue Islands in and out this evening on ATR.... potential for them to take an interest in the Stobart recently closed Jersey route next year?

Rugby charter another one tomorrow two flights back to Jersey on sat p.m.

TF-NEO operated the first KEF-ORK Wow Air flight on the 19th.
First visit of an A320NEO to Cork, I believe, but probably not the first to Ireland.
LX are the next new operator, also with a new aircraft type - the CS100.

Plenty of variety at ORK this summer, 717s from Volotea, C-Series from Swiss, the Alba Star 734 and probably the odd A320NEO from WW.

And TF-DAD A321 TODAY

I see that in April 2018 the EI AMS flight is down to 9x week and from the beginning of March KL is no longer codesharing.

Is there any news on a potential KL service?

My knowledge is that the Codeshare has yet to be confirmed from March 18, what this means is open to interpretation, although the reduction to 9pw isn't a good sign.

Fingers crossed that it's a good sign and that KL will be on the route.

I wouldn't regard the schedules for April next year as being final, unless aircraft utilization suggests there's no scope for change.

In the meantime, I got to use the KEF service last week. As it was 3-4 weeks in, there shouldn't have been any issues with lack of return passengers on a flight. Both flights had 70-80 on them, which isn't great. One flight was operated by an A320, the other by an A321. That number of people really seems lost on an A321. Notably, the bulk of passengers were American rather than from Ireland or Iceland. If anyone is looking at booking travel, KEF is a much nicer airport to connect in than Heathrow or Schiphol.

Two flights cacelled last week, no aircraft available, passengers were offered seats on the Dublin route. It's going to the old story, use or lose it.:sad:

The seat maps suggest numbers are a bit better in July and early August, but nobody is going to sustain a route that works for 6 weeks of the year.

A couple of things in Cork's favour are that the airline is adding aircraft and they may be willing to tough it out to establish the route and that the sector is short enough that it can be used to regain time on a delayed aircraft (as they are used for flights to the US in the overnight slots, there's no getting things back in order overnight). Against that, they have cancelled a number of non-working destinations and there are a few UK airports (Cardiff, Newcastle, Liverpool) with no Iceland service and which could offer a similar sector time.

BE will increase Cardiff to x3 weekly over winter operating Tue, Thu, Su.

Zurich is on sale for June 2018 now, so it seems that at least one of the new routes from a new carrier has managed to stick.

Good news from both CWL and ZRH. There must be the possibility of a longer season and/or increased frequencies next year - IIRC LX increased the frequency to twice weekly for the entire season before the first flight.

I hope KEF can remain - the likelihood of D8 launching an NYC area flight seems to have reduced - at least until they have more real-world experience with the performance of the MAX. Hopefully the breathing space will give WOW a chance to establish.

Unfortunately, Zurich doesn't seem to start any earlier. I would have thought that if a season extension was in order, it would have been more likely to add May than to add October.