So lets try to answer some of the previous assumptions with fact.

St Ives was busy over half term .... well if it wasn't busy as that is a peak week and it is one of the most popular places in Cornwall to see. But why all the Germans? Maybe the arrival of cruise liners Delphin (520 passengers), Berlin (450 passengers) that week into Falmouth has something to do with it. Artania bought 1188 of our German friends the week before and 590 arrive on Astor next week - should I go on?

There may well be a demand for a limited number of high season flights to the Fatherland as Cornishsimon suggest but I venture that demand is limited and would not change the airport's fortunes.

Paully:- to quote John McEnroe..... " You cannot be serious"

Phileas:- You are getting to used to that Tropical Island, the Winters here are great (compared to my other home anyway) its the Summer that is the problem.

Plymspotter:- Car hire at Newquay Airport is limited. Not surprising when just down the road in Truro you have a choice of Hertz,Avis,Europcar etc and half a dozen local companies most of whom will deliver to the airport if required!

Getting here, true the rest of the UK has more attractions than Cornwall does but then it is a bit bigger. The trains are slow though we are promised this is being attended to and Mr Cameron has granted the cash to widen the pinch point on the A30 at Temple to match the rest of the dual carriageway/ motorway which will then reach all the way to Scotland! Add the planned improvements to the A303 and Reading to Heathrow rail link and journeys will be much swifter

Many German and Dutch people arrive in motorhomes and towing caravans, the journey is no problem and IS the holiday. Last year we took our motorhome the other way through France, Switzerland,Germany etc.... do you know what in France I went into a shop and the b@ggers started talking FRENCH! Disgusting!!

Finally yes the airport is hampered in being run by the Council but we all have to understand Newquay is and always will be small regional airport with a limited catchment area so they have a bit of a battle on.

It has three choices:-
Continue at a loss, attracting the scraps where possible
Diversify into other areas, the Helicopter Maintenance Base is a good example
Go to Devon with Plymouth - oh sorry that should read Heaven not Devon.

Sent from Kernow - Land of the friendly folk.

Lucky b*ggers...

You'll be going up the Western side then?

Interesting stuff Groundhog. Didn't know about the cruise ships, which may have contributed to the German numbers, but there were an awful lot of "D"-regged motors (and a few campervans) driving around aswell.... plus the usual "D"-regged bus squeeze down the narrow, windy road into beautiful Porthcurno, when we went on our annual pilgrimage down there.

What will be really interesting is to see what happens to the London "trunk" route from NQY when Flybe pull off it next March.

By the way, whatever you may be told by the Govt about the trains, they will not get any faster west of Exeter until someone straightens out the lines and levels them a bit....although it does make a great journey if you're not in a hurry!

Yes the NQY/LGW is the critical one and as has been much discussed here. A bit of a catch 22 situation. It needs the frequency but cannot support 100 plus seat aircraft and the chance of getting slots in Gatwick for anything suitable is virtually nil.

I really do not know the answer :hmm::confused:

Wycombe - if only trains did 75mph until Plymouth. The average speed is about 55mph, past Newton Abbott and much of the line is capped at 40mph. There is growing uncertainty at the future of the railway anyway; the Transport Secretary recently ruled out a diversionary route to avoid Dawlish as 'uneconomical', so it will continue to be at the mercy of the weather and sea level rise.

Groundhog - tried that. Nearest available car was Plymouth, no delivery option to NQY.

Newquay will never make up the £3m or so shorfall in it's numbers through aviation-related revenues, they have to be much more adventurous with the property portfolio and the land they've gort there - things like a top end aero park with homes with pools and hangars for those wealthy private aviators, exhibition, conference, film studio facilities, some motorsports activity etc. etc. The weather's better down there in terms of sunshine than most of the rest of the UK, the beach is minutes away, there are a raft of trendy new top end hotels etc.

The demographics of the people who go down either for holiday or to there second homes is very broad in wealth terms - half the home counties set are down their as often as they can get down.

With Gatwick's links pulled next year, what you need is runs to the likes of Oxford and Cambridge on the London region periphery, where the money is, where the second home owners come from. Southend/EZY will suffice to a small extent but ideally one needs a London City run again - Fridays, Sundays, Mondays, trouble there is the costs.

However, its the property development that can only subsidise the costs of runing what is pretty significant infrastructure - it's not a little runway. You can't just rely on pulling in aviation maintenance or support companies as the world and their dog are trying that game all over the rest of the country.

Every other sunday evening or so, the weekend's TV movie on the German National TV channel 2 is a Rosamunde Pilcher movie set in the most beautiful parts of Cornwall (with the most popular German TV actors acting as British aristocrats or countryfolk). Despite the beautiful scenery I am at a loss why millions of (older) Germans watch those TV movies because they are always the same - after x years working in London and with an unhappy marriage/partnership in tow, someone returns to his/her hometown in Cornwall, meets a new squeeze, Drama unfolds for an hour or so in beautiful gardens, on horseback, in old convertbile cars or on boats and then - happy end. The next days some watchers undoubtedly storm German travel agencies to book a summer holiday in Cornwall and end up pestering you.

And most welcome they are too....and the Dutch and French who seem to be increasing in numbers all the time, see quite a motorhomes with NL and F plates these days...

What about a seasonal Saturday service from LHR?

BA has obviously decided there is value in using Saturday morning slots at LHR for leisure routes. The Mark Warner charters have been running for a couple of years. IBZ and PMI also launched this year, with LPA following in the winter.

LHR-NQY would work and would see good loads, probably not good yields however.

Connecting traffic would be good on the route but seasonally once a week I can't see.


cs

If the flybe 3x daily NQY-LGW disappears and isn't replaced in any form (I still suspect we'll see EZY will at least one daily A319 year-round LGW-NQY) then I could see sense in BA operating one daily LHR-NQY with perhaps some extra Saturday & Sunday seasonal summer flights too.

Since BA seem to be happy to shovel slots onto a 3x daily LHR-LBA and are known to have "slot sitting" frequencies on some of the other domestics such as LHR-MAN I'd think that a NQY could work for them and, as already commented here, be a useful route to fling on some of those summer weekend slots that they don't see to have much of a use for on anything else..

Totally agree globetrotter.

LHR-NQY on BA would be a dream route as it would open up Europe and the world to Cornwall.

Seems Far to sensible to me


cs

Putting global connectivity aside, trouble with LHR is that in practice, were you coming down to Cornwall, the time it takes from arriving at LHR to actually running down the runway, you'd be more than halfway down to Cornwall in your car, doesn't really stack up on that front. LCY would be much nicer on that front or any of the SE UK, London region 'regional' airports, a hour from downtown London.

Come on mate, BA tried LGW-NQY and it was flying a fuselage full of little more than fresh air most days. In my experience, Newquay was a grotty little airport with a money grabbing philosophy run by the pond life council in a region already well served by the train. It's no more likely to get a LHR link than Inverness as neither has enough high yield connecting traffic in addition to those willing to pay a massive premium to fly into WEST London. Let's be realistic, it's a pipe dream, even with three runways at LHR I bet they still wouldn't touch it. APD has made it hard enough to get mass market England-Scotland connections, an England-England connection is a pretty tough cookie and requires a substantial business community to support it. Cornwall has some major wealth but not enough industry to make it viable. I'd be more worried about NQY even being a commercial airfield in five years than a wish list of serving the most congested hub airport on Western Europe.

BA aren't going to serve it just because you happen to have a house there.

Do they do this with any other domestic or British Islands route? A once per day competing against the train would be mainly leisure traffic only, an utter waste of a LHR slot in the mid afternoon long haul departure period? No way.

Yes, but SZ was running competitively priced thrice daily services to LGW and FR to STN (once daily I believe). There will now be just a thrice weekly SEN service - hardly regular competition and on the other side of London.

Nobody ever said LBA would happen (and even if it did, never thrice daily - 'why wouldn't they just shove more frequencies on the other domestics?', came the regular protest) - yet since BE pulled out of LGW and the BM slots have been inherited it has happened.

Of course I wouldn't expect anything regular or business orientated, but if BA can serve LBA, IBZ, PMI as well as the charters out of LHR then I see no reason why NQY doesn't stand a chance. Nobody ever said LCY would get its IOM route. It did, and on a Saab 2000... whoever says they saw that coming is telling a porky.

It might be unlikely but certainly not 'no way'.

LCY-IOM was an existing route run for years when EuroManx built up the route well, Aer Arann continued it and only left for SEN for strategic reasons. BA / CFE just picked up someone else's market when they walked off. Whereas LBA is the overflow from MAN where BA know the existing Exec Club members in the region who use MAN as well as nicking existing traffic currently connecting with KLM.

LBA has a little under three million passengers and is borderline LHR material, currently struggling but with some hope to make it.
NQY has under 170,000! In all seriousness you'd see JER, GCI and INV well before NQY ever got a LHR link.

Apples and pears.

On my recent run to Conwall, we drove down from Berks on the Friday evening at the start of half-term week (24th May), running through Exeter at around 11pm and arriving in west Cornwall a couple of hours later.

Even past midnight, there was a fairly heavy stream of high-speed westbound traffic along the A30 into Cornwall, and it was noticeable how most of the vehicles were, shall one say, at the higher-end of the market (LR's, Jags, Beemers, Mercs etc)

How many of these vehicles were occupied by the "second-home set" on the race west from London and the home Counties for the weekend? A fair few, I bet?

Even if only 25% of them were happy to leave the car and fly to Cornwall, you could have easily filled a 319 from LHR or LGW that evening.

I also saw (on a rail users forum) that every train to Devon/Cornwall that afternoon/evening from Paddington was reserved solid, including the sleeper. All those people (an HST carries nearly 500, not including those left standing!) obviously didn't feel the need, or have the means to take a car. The quickest trains from Paddington to Penzance take 5 hours, and some a bit more.

I realise this is an example from a peak travel period, but the demand must be there for some sort of daily (at least) service to NQY once Flybe pull out.

OK so I cannot reveal too much at the moment but when Flybe stop operating and IF no one else takes over the Gatwick route and IF NQY play ball something is afoot that the naysayers will say is impossible and will really make you think!

Necessity is the Mother of Invention, the "experts" told my old Company we couldn't put our 737's on GB Airways AOC and we did, they told Stelios that easyjet was not possible from Luton and Michael Fish said there wouldn't be a hurricane...

So with a little help from my friends watch this space:D

Looking at the situation, I would be surprised if easyJet turned down a once daily to Newquay - I can even see 8/9 weekly with an extra few services around the weekend. To me the question mark is, from which airport will it operate?

Going slightly off topic, but following on from your quote Skipness, you may be interested to note that Tarom have recently launched a 2x weekly service from Iasi in NE Romania to Heathrow. Iasi airport in 2012 had approx 170,000 passengers.
Then again this new route to Iasi may not last that long... !

I get the impression that skipness doesn't care tbh ;)

For the record I never said a LHR route would ever be launched, however if one existed it would be well used both by locals and tourists and business alike.

What Cornwall/ NQY lack is connectivity. Why a LHR would bring to nqy/cornwall is connectivity. Will it be the best domestic route ex LHR no, probably the worse.

However the quoted BA LGW route as pointed out faced stiff competition from SZ who were operating frequency. The London market is give or take 100,000 pa. That's a ready made market for someone, a London route with an airline offering decent onward connectivity, thru ticketing etc would bring in many more punters, even just by making the domestic / Irish destinations available again/ available year round.

Will it happen, probably not.

Should it, yes !

BA LHR route ex NQY would open up the world and Europe to Cornwall and bring business and tourism to Cornwall.

Just my opinion, no matter how wrong I keep getting told I am.


cs

David - you may as well call Iasi 'Chisinau West'. This new service is aimed at those who travel into Romania from Moldova to fly.

xtypeman - Northolt. Some interesting things happening on that front.

Thank you PlymSpotter. Yes Northolt is another option also Biggin Hill each would serve a different potential. It may be that there could be a spread of services to different airfields as required. This is what opens up this idea to regional centres around the country and the near Europe. Southampton for cruises etc Shoreham for Gatwick connections. Routes would be very much business driven not airline driven.

Time for that beer xtypeman, if you remember the old trick we used from the colonies and how that worked you can see how it is all put together.... very simple, very efficient and the man in London with the fuzzy hair is giving his full support.:ok:

For the gentleman contemplating corporate shuttles using the likes of Biggin Hill or Farnborough, you should be aware that niether is permitted whatsoever to undertake scheduled services, or 'pay for seat' operations of any kind - whole aircraft charters, not 'airline' services.

That leaves say Cambridge, Cranfield, Oxford, of which Oxford has by far the better demographics. Forget Lydd, Manston etc., hopeless.

For the Gentleman trying to teach his Grandmother to suck eggs who said anything about scheduled services or pay per seat?:rolleyes:

Quote: "Will it happen, probably not.

Should it, yes !

BA LHR route ex NQY would open up the world and Europe to Cornwall and bring business and tourism to Cornwall.

Just my opinion, no matter how wrong I keep getting told I am.


cs "

Agreed, you're not wrong, it needs to be LHR-NQY, but until and unless LHR is expanded, there isn't a hope in hell.

So how would you get money off the general public?

Everyone flies for free..... You work it out:ok:

NQY-FAB
 

xtypeman, your idea would work best using NHT, if it is ever going to open to small scale scheduled operations (and do NOT mean as a third LHR rwy!). Also leisure travellers should be catered for as well as business travellers.

Provided a station is provided adjacant to a NHT terminal, it could be 17 minutes to the west end (Marylebone) and a coach to LHR is just a 6 mi. ride.

PlymSpotter, what is happening at NHT?

Or you could have a luxury vehicle waiting to take the passengers if they wanted to wherever they wanted to go City, Airport, Dockland ( for a fee of course)......

You can't use Northolt for commercial air transport movements, not permitted. Same as Biggin and Farnborough.

Indeed you can't, hence the words in my post:

"...if it is ever going to open to small scale scheduled operations..."

in reference to NHT.

Northolt and Biggen are used purely as potential examples. The system has to be thought of in a different light it may be that you overfly London but as the journey uses transport right through to the last mile eg door to door. Some of the final destinations might be other airports but more than likely an office. Yes there would be availability for the general public . As numbers increase services could need larger size aircraft but it would all be driven by demand.

There are a number of plans and variation of plans, the general gist being to see Northolt accept more civil traffic. This includes the possibility of scheduled services to regions of the UK which have lost their own links to LHR/LGW.

It's an interesting idea, and it has some significant backing.

Quote: "There are a number of plans and variation of plans, the general gist being to see Northolt accept more civil traffic. This includes the possibility of scheduled services to regions of the UK which have lost their own links to LHR/LGW.

It's an interesting idea, and it has some significant backing."

It's good idea to open NHT to civil traffic and it needs to happen, even if it's just a stopgap until LHR is expanded.

We have the templates: SEN, LCY.

Frank - do you REALLY want the whole of London up in arms about aircraft noise?

One of the problems with LHR expansion (and LGW) is that the airline business makes promises on flight numbers to get their way and a few years later tries to expand the numbers way past the original scheme - thus no-one believes a word we say and even small improvements meet die-in-the-ditch opposition every time

You're mixing up cause and effect. People who know what needs to be done understand that the only way most of our fellows might buy it is to lie, then allow a few years to pass. No one believes a word of it because no one wants to face the reality of a painful price required to ensure we have growth to pay our very substantial debts. The idea there is some fantastic way around this is a childlike naivety. Democracy is all "me, me, me" and very little "us".

You would most likely be talking props and small next-gen regional jets - more a second LCY than an expansion similar to Heathrow. That isn't going to 'affect' 5% of London, let alone the whole of it.