There's going to be a BMI 321 operating for Baby out of MAN for the summer until the 737-300 scheduled for arrival late summer replaces it.

WW
 

Good to finally see some new routes from them. Interesting choice to return to the BCN route though, as I recall they operated this when they first set up at MAN but conceded alongside IB to ZB. ZB have had a stranglehold on this route from MAN for a while now, will be interesting to see if WW and FR (Girona) can make inroads.

Fantastic to see the great city of Madrid will be up on the departure screens again this summer :)

Right, anyone for Berlin whilst we're at it?!

ww
 

Flyboy UK

You advise that BMI will operate a 321 for WW until the 737 arrives late summer.

Will this 321 be the 4th A/C at MAN until the 737 arrives or is the 321/737 a fifth A/C being based.

The reason I ask as noted in my earlier post the new flights to BCN from September need a fifth A/C


Viscount

FlyZB speaks sense.

I would add that MAN could also try competing on service rather than on price (there's a novelty eh?) Little Chef recently tried cutting prices to win back business - look what happened.

If people want to fly, a few extra pence off the landing fees (if the airline even passes them on to pax) won't make much difference.

In case you haven't noticed, real inflation (petrol, diesel, gas, potatoes, wheat, local and national taxes) is far higher than RPI or CPI would suggest, and with the recent credit scares, people are tightening their belts. I know I am. Travel suddenly becomes optional not taken for granted, and this will also have an effect on traffic levels at most airports.


Yes totally agree, The Taxes increase but the wages go nowhere:ugh:

This 'Avalanche' of credit chaos has come from America and at the end of the day people only have the same amount of money to spend.

The piggy bank is getting smaller.:*

Hudson bay said - bmi to announce new routes fom Manchester next week. Very clever indeed. We all know what next week coincides with!!

I beleive this to be the start of a massive expansion by bmi at Manchester.

My money is on Poland and somewhere mid-haulish and later said the announcement would be between 22nd and 25th

My question now is we have had Baby announcing Lisbon, Madrid and Barcelona, welcome but hardly exciting and today is the 26th are we to expect more from bmi or is that it?

Hate to be gloomy ( yet again ) but surely this news re WW is just at the margins ?

Welcome though it is , 3 a week here and 2 a week there......well it isnt exactly earth shattering is it ?

Manchester needs to look at how it does things as does the UK aviation industry as a whole.

Whilst last nights peice on BAA was mildly entertaining the most interesting item was right at the end,

"according to the CAA there is little point putting more terminals and runways into the South East because there is no airspace".

Therefore rather than "ramming" everybody into the South East there has to be another solution.

The airlines will not move on this because there is no incentive to do so, why on earth duplicate costs. I do not blame them, but should there be incentives , tax breaks or dare I suggest tax penalties ?

Manchester itself appears to slumber/plod on with no radical ideas or solutions. We gain airlines , they increase frequency and then they wither.....

Nothing changes...!

One telling statistic from another thread referred to the number of flights to New York from the South East, it is now over 30 a day ......!!!!!!!

Compare this to our very own JFK flight, I refer of course to the "meagre" offerings of BA and its scintillating daily BA767, a route which has seen no expansion in frequency or capacity for almost 30 years !

There cannot be another service in the world that has so resisted the weight or public expectation from business or sailed headlong against a suststained backdrop of general economic growth.

Maybe Manchester is punching above its weight, maybe it is just a "regional airport" done good, maybe it doesn't actually deserve major expansion, it seems to do just enough despite itself and it's management, but is "just enough" actually good enough anymore ?

Manchester should do better, the city is fantastic and is now a major European centre ( forgeting of course the sterotypical image still portrayed by the buffoons running Look NW, The Manchester Evening News and even god bless them the Local Council := )

I talk to business leaders throughout the US and Europe they view the City as a major economic hot house and THAT is why it is not just another regional airport and should not be lumped with Birmingham , Glasgow, Newcastle etc as it so often is.

If only somebody would recognise this and put in place the conditions to make it work !!!!

Rant over.

Guys, this is only the start. Rome wasn't built in a day. Fantastic things are happening at bmi. Like I said more routes are on the cards but secrecy is everything in this business.

Ryanair's website is down at the moment and bookings for these new routes are 4 times the normal for a route launch.

Big things are happening at Manchester which includes mainline, regional and bmibaby. New aircraft are difficult to get hold of but someone has managed a deal that is remarkable to say the least.

An Analyst stated that 2008 was the year the UK would see a major change in Aviation. He went on to say that it would involve bmi. All I can say is watch this space. It is exciting.

For those that think 3 new routes is not enough in 1 day, I suggest you go and do some bungee jumping. For the rest of you, I can tell you, that from what I know this is the most exciting time in my Aviation career of 20 years.

Hudson Bay........................

When can we expect this Exciting announcement?...........

BMI commercial department promised me a MAN-SOU service was imminent, mind you, that was two years ago.

Re wish list from BMI ( or how about Lufthansa basing some aircraft over here for the US services for that matter)

Daily Lax,
Daily Boston
Daily Mumbai
Daily Melbourne
Daily Kuala Lumpur
Daily Toronto
Daily Tokyo

with 4 a week each to to Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, NZ.

Now THAT would get the pulse racing !!!:D

Even this modest number would still be a low base relative to the actual pax numbers passing thru the South East that actually originate up here based on current evidence , but it would at least be a start .....and would in itself also stop the drip feed of traffic thru FRA and CDG , it might also generate traffic from other UK regions, if prices were realistic and comparable to LHR.

.....unless of course the airlines and BAA actually want to get to the stage where there is a an hourly LHR - shuttle to all these cities...

.....i'm all for choice but c'mon, in some cases it is getting that way.

Just one other point re prices , is it not against OFT rules to have prices so way out of kilter where it can actually be 20% dearer to fly direct than via LHR ?

Ryanair's website is down at the moment and bookings for these new routes are 4 times the normal for a route launch.


How do you know, if the website is down? :confused:

Peeps there is a fundamental problem here that you are all conveniently ignoring. Take Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur, both former BA destinations. Nowadays there is no need to offer half a B747 a few times a week to an exotic faraway place, the passegers still fly BA but are carried onwards by a Oneworld partner. In OZ this is QANTAS. In the UK the feeders are BA and BMI for ONEWORLD and STAR respectively. The hub airport is Heathrow, not London the city, Heathrow the world hub. This is partly the reason the Singapore aren't pushing Manchester the way they used to. They are building LHR as a STAR ALLIANCE hub, slowly but surely. Every passenger direct to Manchester bypasses part of the business model and upsets a part of the airline. Same as BA. There are important people who feel that every MAN-JFK pax ought to be via LHR as that is the business model. To build long haul from
MAN undermines the model and pits one part of the airline against another part of the same airline !
Since all the big players are now in alliances, I don't see a major breakthrough in the future. The glory days of SAA, Air India etc I think are gone forever.

And that is why the likes of Emirates and Qatar have jumped in and milked off the PAX that wont be told what to do by BA or One World executives. We in the north are not sheep, we are educated, well travelled and know when we are being shafted ! I would rather loose a leg than fly through Heathrow.

Do the faction of people in BA who may advocate closing down MAN-JFK not realize that if this route was not operating then most of the business would probably go to Continental, Delta or a new entrant. The business model of feeding every passenger into Heathrow may work for some markets like OZ but I feel it is going to come under increasing pressure especially to North America. BA will have to introduce more non Heathrow flights across the Atlantic or it will increasingly loose out on business.

"The glory days of SAA, Air India etc I think are gone forever."

I agree, the likelihood of catching SA, CX, QF etc all lined up together on the tarmac again at MAN on scheduled pax services like the early 90's is pretty remote. However thats not to say the likes of Oasis HK, Jetstar, Air Asia X and, possibly, closer to home Zoom UK won't look at MAN in the absence of the legacy carriers returning......hopefully all is not lost on long-haul services just yet.

However if the lower cost carriers I mention here don't commit to MAN over the next couple of years then that might be the time to worry :eek:

LN
 

According to OAG LN are adding a Tuesday flight.

Viscount

So ManGuy is saying MAN doesn't mind losing the brands, as long as it gets some second-tier fly-by-nights (pun intended) to replace them.

Much like those 70s office blocks where the original blue-chip tenant moves out after 25 years, and is replaced by some dodgy company that goes bust shortly afterwards, and forever after the building has a "to let" sign on it.....

.....then the office block is demolished to build apartments or a shopping mall.

Maybe the time has come to sell the land to Peel to build a shopping centre on, that south Manchester and Cheshire residents can get to, without risking their lives on the M60 to the Trafford Centre.

P.S. are the rumours of a McDonald's coming to Handforth Dean true?

No..it's the Burglar King that the "Staff" can't get to....:{
watpiktch

You could take that view Mr Lapse, but you could also take the view that businesses have to change with the times or die. Manchester Airport bosses were in danger of achieving that when they tried to hang on to BA, and looked down their nose at lo cost carriers. However they now seem to have realised that locost is here to stay, and if harnessed in a controlled way can make an airport an awful lot of money.

Sure some carriers might be here today gone tomorrow outfits, but that's all part of the gamble in business - picking enough that are long term prospects that it outweighs the more dubious propositions. Just because they don't have names on the fuselage that have been around for 50 years, and follow a similarly aged model doesn't mean they won't prove very lucrative. I suspect that for an airport the number of bums on seats is much more important to them than it is for the airlines, who need the yield. After all Business/First class pax are just as likely to ignore all the shops as locost pax, possibly even more so. As I understand it an airport generally charges by pax in/out, and aircraft size (among other factors), so 400 pax on an Oasis 744 is probably at least as attractive as 250 pax on a Cathay 340.

When I was first interested in aviation the idea that Sabena, Swissair, Dan Air etc would no longer be around would have had one laughed out of the airport, but guess what - it happened. In 20 years time who knows? Air Asia X with 5-10 Far East routes, Easyjet with 20 aircraft based, Ryanair with 10? Or Liverpool could get a massive investment from a billionaire, buy Manchester, install a high speed rail link between the 2, and turn Manchester into a housing estate, and Liverpool into a 30 million pax p.a. superhub.

Things change.....

BA MAN to JFK is quite an interesting one, becasue if it were to go, CO and DL using 757s are not comparable service level replacements. Only VS or BD would offer the Y class cabin standards of a widebody with PTVs and oremium economy etc. which makes this service so popular and unique from MAN.