When the pax reach the aircraft door, it is one at a time. If you load with rear stairs as well, it improves matters greatly.

Yesterday I was boarding a BA 320 and we all filed on from the air brudge in time honoured fashion, with all the locker packing delays we know so well.

Blue Air in S20 are retrenching to Romanian destinations only, dropping Turin and Larnaca.
Schedule shows Bacau 6pw, Bucharest 11 and Iasi 3.

Can't compete with Wizzair on Larnaca, but nobody else does Turin, thought that might remain.

Not too surprised about BlueAir. Still cannot understand that nobody (except Ryanair a few times a week) flies to Bulgaria's second largest city Plovdiv with a catchment area of 1.5 million. There must be a 'problem' with the airport authorities as Wizz and easyJet do not operate any services from there. Also it is a 12 month destination with skiing in the winter months.

Might have something to do with this https://150sec.com/fastest-shrinking...ulgaria/11022/

That's surprising they're dropping Larnaca. It's always packed. Last summer they positioned an ac from LPL few times to fly to Larnaca in pairs.

Blue Air are flying Larnaca to Athens, Heraklion and Thessalonika in S20, together with routes to Romania. I suspect this amounts to a reduction in services ex-Larnaca.

Turkmenistan Airlines to start flying from Luton to Ashgabat from December 2019
Perhaps a bit random, but it's an airline with pax that is unlikely to go bust so I imagine the airport will happily sign up T5 as a customer...

They lost their Heathrow slot in or around February. They will introduce a weekly services starting next Tuesday although it can’t be booked via the airline.

Given the proximity of LTN to BHX, I really question why T5 feel the need to serve both airports. Pre the European ban they had a much larger, and very long standing operating in BHX, and undoubtedly long term relationships with many of the specialist travel agents in the Midlands. Clearly there is a market from the North London hotspots and a similar network of agents with whom they will have been working previously, but I would have though that they may have been better directing those London agents towards the BHX operation. Funny that in the Midlands and Norther we're "expected" to travel to London, but London passengers apparently can't travel in the other direction to catch their flights!

Years ago, I flew to Ashgabat with Lufthansa - the plane was full of Brits and Americans sent to work in Ashgabat as some sort of well-paid purgatory in engineering/hydrocarbon sectors. Does this corporate demand still exist from London ?

Now being told that Luton will not be able to accept the Turkmenistan service as they are up against the 18 million pax cap. Apparently Air India was sent to STN for the same reason.

I thought it was only once a week to start with and with Blue Air reductions.
PS Don't say that about Air India, you will get a reaction.😀

Some say that the airport has actually got to cut flights to stay within 18 million rather than just say no to new airlines.

Explains nicely why for commercial reasons LLAOL has put in a planning application to the council to exceed this limit. By law the planning committee is meant to be independent of the council but in reality takes orders from those running the council as it is their airport. Many eyes are watching this application with the council under pressure to not only turn it down but to also turn down another planning application to exceed night time noise limits that were breached for 2 consecutive years. In that case the council did nothing to enforce the planning rule as they were too busy counting the extra money those breaches earned the council. This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase having its fingers in the till.

Worth noting that in the planning summery for 32 million, which the council is dishing out to the masses at consultation events, the council states that night movements will not increase above existing limits yet even before the ink is dry LLAOL wants to increase this limit.

As at 30.09.19 - 12m rolling pax was 17,978,237

There are not many posts on PPRuNe that get me into a rage but the above is one of them so I apologise from my lack of tolerance when I have stated how tolerant this thread is to different view points.

Now my rant
Only someone who is intellectually challenged and ignorant would write such a comment. So how near is too near that they should not complain?

For a start the locals bought homes next to a 70 acre park and not an airport that wants to mug the residents of their park. Secondly people can live miles from an airport and be impacted by aircraft noise whether by new flight paths or just a massive increase in movements.

Then there is the environmental impact. Have you not heard of climate change and what that could do to the world or is it a case that you really don't care?

Oh I said in my last post that the airport had broken night noise limits for 2 years. It was actually 3.

An interesting read on the ACL slot coordinators web site about S20 slots, if the limits are to be pushed upwards, aka 19M pax limit next year, it will need to be in place by 15th Jan 2020 then two week period of republished slot allocations after allocation to airlines on waiting list, or that's the way I read it.

It won't happen as the airport has already put in place a seat cap from April to October 2020 and a maximum daily seat cap is envisaged for summer 2021 onwards . The effect of these caps will be that in order to introduce higher capacity aircraft the carriers will have to cut movements so the airport will end up with spare slots it can't use although this could benefit biz jets

How about those that have lived close to the airport, suffered in silence and then discover Tinminal 2 is going to built on their door step and huge new fuel farm created with dozens and dozens of extra tanker trips to Buncefield. Add in the noise and pollution created by cars, service vehicles, ground power units and aircraft engines.

Please do check your facts first.

If they did decamp their LTN operation to STN there slots would gladly be taken by others. I'm sure EZY would love to see them off the AMS route, fairs would rise on what is the No1 route from Luton.

Vacant slots would not necessarily be taken due to the seat cap. So how would a seat cap actually work as scheduled aircraft don’t normally fly full? Clearly the cap can’t be set at 18 million available seats as less than 18 million passengers would use them. If the cap was set at 18,800,000 seats to allow for say a 90% occupancy what would happen if 95% of seats were filled? Will airlines each have their own quota? Can quotas be traded.

The caping requirement for 2020 and above appears on new documentation for the proposals to increase noise at the airport for 5 years due to a lack of neo aircraft operating out of Luton. The documentation also states that due to the ban on Max aircraft Easyjet want to hang on to their A319’s for longer as they see an opportunity to increase business.

The planning application for new noise limits is now out for fresh consultations so a decision won’t be made until 2020.

The airport operator now only wants to increase noise at night and not during the day despite daytime levels nearly being reached. Does this mean the separate planning application for 19 million can only happen even if approved when more neo aircraft come to Luton?

Does LTN have shortage of departure slots in the evenings. Wizz Air changed schedulle of flighs VNO-LTN from 9 December, moving them a bit earlier but LTN-VNO was left as is at 21:50. Now Vilnius aircraft has turnaround time of almost two hours on some days instead of usual 40 minutes for a 321. Will they be able to keep aircraft for two hours at a gate?

Sometimes people put inappropriate comments on forums out of ignorance. Sometimes they are in the category or "internet trolls" and post inflammatory comments designed to aggravate knowing they can cower anonymously behind their keyboard. Yahoo!® which are you?
I don't live close enough to the airport to be affected by the increased noise and pollution the planned expansion will cause. Having worked there for 40+ years I have always been in favour of expansion. Not this time. The current plan is ill-conceived to the point of stupidity. Enough is enough. Build T2 elsewhere, preferably south of the runway.

Yahoo!® has mentioned working at LTN in the past, (so it could in reality be LLA given the "expand at any cost" mentality!)

As another long-time airport worker it is painful just how ridiculous the proposed T2 plans are. LBC/LLA need to finally accept the many limitations the current airport site has and stop wasting local Council tax payers money on this current T2 joke!

Boeing_eng - you may well be right in your judgment. However the lure of cold hard cash can tempt a lot of people to do suboptimal things...

Could well be an aircraft change alm1 regarding the Vilnius service. Regarding Turkmenistan Airlines new weekly service I would have thought they would have checked the operation of the service I.e. with thought to passenger numbers but there again we are talking about London Luton Airport!

Apologies if it has already been me mentioned Sharm el Sheikh is back on the destination board with a weekly TUI flight commencing 5 November 2020.

The expansion debate needs to be seen in the context of UK transport policy, or lack of it. I'm afraid Britain is very bad at successful forward planning, mainly I think because it is very crowded - particularly in the south-east. The fact is that all our major airports are overcrowded, but by good (short-term) management, cope with huge demand. The same applies to the London underground, the roads network and railways.
As long as people want/need to travel, facilities should be made available for them to do so. I will not address the climate change hysteria, as that brings in a whole lot of new questions and unconsidered possibilities.
Heathrow is overcrowded, as are Gatwick and Stansted. Yet there is still more demand for air services to/from London, to the extent that Southend has picked up a chunk of the market despite its location and limitations.
It makes sense to build new infrastructure to cope with the demand, and that can only happen at existing airports. I'm sure Luton will get its cap increased eventually, but the current T2 proposal looks like putting several quarts into a pint pot. Unfortunately, local government parochialism is preventing Luton from building new infrastructure in the obvious place - south of the runway.
I would hope that common sense prevails, and that sensible expansion can be approved. Aircraft have become much quieter since the first One-Elevens and 737-200s arrived in the late sixties and that trend continues with the neos. Surely growth can be accompanied by noise abatement planning requirements - for example, if you can't operate neos, you can't come in. And surely some of the noise nuisance caused by large corporate aircraft can be "re-allocated" to passenger airliners.

ACL Report S20
 

As you would expect a very small increase in seats due to 18m pa cap

Easyjet = 5,680,572

Wizz = 5,569,074

Ryanair = 1,644,300

Blue Air = 264,205

Tui = 205,980

ElAl = 120,812

Vueling = 109,680

Level = 83,120

Sun Express = 63,126
https://www.acl-uk.org/wp-content/up...ion-Report.pdf

Why the big reduction by DHL if the allocation is because of the passenger cap?

Last year in the summer peak, Wizz has had a couple of departures before 6am thus cutting into the night noise restriction period, which is subject to next years planning application to increase the noise limit. This seemed to be down to the fact that once the clock hits 6am the airport has a lack of slots for a couple of hours. With this in mind I would then have expected that in the winter season Wizz would move those departures to after 6am to save this limited resource but no they just carry on. Tomorrow for example there are two 5:30 departures yet there are only 3 departures between 6:00 and 6:24. They don't seem to be putting much effort into helping themselves.

I don't think they used all of them S19 so more likely just a more realistic slot allocation.
No Fly Bosnia!

But there maybe slot constraints at the airport they are flying to, not always easy to wiggle things around both ends.
Edit: Looking at those destinations though, I can't see any if those airports being slot constrained, but they could be on flights later in the day.

OCTOBER PASSENGER STATISTICS
A total of 1,643,040 passengers used the airport in October s rise of 8.4% on October 2018. The rolling 12 month figure is 17,917,519 up 10.2%. The total for the first ten months of 2019 is 15,524,308 up 9.4%. Could somebody verify is the 18 million cap on a rolling 12 month period or over a 12 month period 1 Jan to 31 December.

The cap would mean the end of one off charter flights like for football matches, Formula one etc I would have thought unless some capped seats were held back. Also will it be a variable monthly cap so the seats don’t get taken too quickly or a yearly cap?

Also, and this is the real big one to consider, if the trend is upwards as last months 10% increase is indicating then airlines will have to cut services by 10% to stop further increases and to get a growth rate of zero. Last year it was the biz jets that got cut back, now it is the airlines turn.

Luton loss will be another Airports gain. Sad that a successful and thriving business is not allowed to expand.