Still a bit of a mystery as to why he needed to divert given everything else just before and after was landing ok and the weather reports were not giving gusts at that stage.

MAN did lose some more flights after midnight but I gather they went to EMA & LPL.

Icelandair at Birmingham
 

Showing in Icelandair booking system, Icelandair will increase flights from Birmingham to Keflavik from two to four per week early in 2016. Showing as departing BHX Monday, Tuesday (New),Thursday and Saturday (New) from 1/2/2016 :ok:

Ice
 

This seems to be 3 weekly for the winter increasing to 4 as per above.

Belavia???
 

This may help BHX / Air India
 

NEW DELHI: The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has restored India's safety
rating to Category I, fourteen months after the country's aviation regulator was
downgraded to category II. This means the country's carriers such as Air India
and Jet AirwaysBSE -3.47 % can now go ahead with plans to increase flights
to the US and other parts of the world.

The FAA informed the
Directorate General of Civil Aviation about the move in a letter to the
regulator and the civil aviatio ..



Read more at:
US FAA upgrades India's aviation safety rating - The Economic Times

Belavia
 

Would be interesting if Belavia were to start flights to Birmingham. What is the demand like at Birmingham for flights to Minsk?

Belavia already serve Birmingham with a short season of weekly charters from Minsk each summer.

These are likely to run as schedules from 2016 but don't expect anything more than weekly service from June through September similar to the Manchester flights.

The demand is to the UK in the main and the existence of the Manchester operations in particular is medical respite care for cancer patients related to the long forgotten Chernobyl accident.

Belavia already serve Birmingham with a short season of weekly charters from Minsk each summer.

Belavia have NOT been at BHX for many years !

Most of the Norwegian BHX-AGP flights on a Saturday during June, July & August are now showing full, pricing on MAD/BCN looks very soft, but they don't start for a couple of months yet

Madrid has started but as LNIDA says BCN had not started yet
It looks like LPA TFS this Winter

LNIDA.

The MAD and AGP flights started at the end of March.
BCN starts 1st June.

But yes a very encouraging start to NAX's operations from BHX as many of the flights during the holiday period were full or close to being full.

There are lots of rumors flying around at the moment concerning Norwegian,Air India,plus further Chinese flights amongst others.
I know this happens every year at all airports but things are looking very good for a very busy 2015 and beyond.

How is it good if Norwegians flights are already full for the summer peak? At the very least it demonstrates appalling Revenue Management. Their competition must be laughing and rubbing their hands together at the prospect of all those nice juicy high fares still to come of which Norwegian will have 0! Either they have seriously dropped the ball or sold a large chunk off to a 3rd party late in the day when they already had reasonable sales in.

Not sure how you work that one out TartinTon. I would imagine that revenue management would have increased fare price as seats were sold and not by the date of sale!

Norwegian
 

TartinTon

I am not saying that you are right or wrong but I feel BHX has a problem high season with a lack of seats to certain destinations and Malaga is one such example along with Palma and Alicante.

East Mids usually get an extra Ryanair unit plying these types of routes in August whereas BHX gets a couple of Monarch night flights. This means that there is a lot of leakage to EMA and any newcomer like Norwegian should be able fill seats quickly if priced at the right level. In fact if you look at the CAA stats for the whole of summer East Mids thrashes BHX on the routes mentioned above yet which airport has twice as many passengers?

I know "we" do go on about long-haul and business routes most of the time but there is still quite a bit of leakage in summer on bread and butter Mediterranean destinations although if an airline (e.g.Ryanair) can comfortably obtain more profit from the EMA base rather BHX due airport fees then so be it but there is a market for Norwegian to tap into, as to whether they have their revenue management right is well above my head.

TartinTon
 

Norwegians revenue management like most airlines is demand driven and they have demonstrated at LGW the benefit of using low leading pricing to build market share, the full flights are mainly Saturday flights and lots of availability on the other days with reasonable pricing.

Talk of based aircraft at BHX continues, but that will have to wait for 2016 aircraft deliveries i guess

Aggresively taking market share at a loss is only good if you have deep pockets, think BA at LCY. I wonder if Norwegian are picking too many fights at once sometimes?

As OltonPete alluded to above, BHX has a comparatively small number of seats available to some sun destinations, so I wouldn't necessarily suggest that they are picking fights on those routes.

It will be interesting to see, however, how the competition (FR and ZB) may react, should Norwegian decide to base equipment at BHX, and begin an assault on the Midlands market.

Have the BA/Sun Air flights to Gothenburg ceased now? They didn't last very long if so.

They never started!

Vueling S15

Vueling are to start their Barcelona service a week earlier than planned with two Saturday flights for half-term on May 23rd (08:25/09:05) and May 30th (17:10/17:50)