A commonly held myth. There's actually no additional charge for Airbridges. The reason steps are used at front and back is purely for speed of turn-around.

Skipness One Echo

I don't know, but I would imagine that using the buses would keep some options open for a decision to be made later - e.g. drag the aircraft off the stand to make way for an arrival, or use a different aircraft altogether.

That’s true, most airports don’t charge for airbridges. It’s a speed of turnaround decision which is made locally at each station. If anything, it’s probably more expensive to use steps or atleast some underlying cost of using steps as this has to be factored into the contract with the handling agent.

Besides the bus contract is with a different company and would've cost the company extra (it was £1 per passenger when National Express operated it many moons ago).

Only reasonable answer I could offer is that Gate 45 is closer to the departure lounge - when passengers have been called for boarding and then dispersed, there is a reluctance to call them again until there is a reasonable assurance that the flight can depart. Calling passengers back to 109 would've taken a fair amount of extra time.

British Airways has just confirmed its largest London Gatwick summer scheduled in a decade, after acquiring the ex Monarch Airline landing and take-off slots.

British Airways - BIGGEST SUMMER SCHEDULE IN A DECADE AT GATWICK

Highlights

New routes to Palma (Majorca), Mahon (Menorca) and Gibraltar.

Tenerife = Increases from 6 to 13 weekly
Madeira = Increases from 6 to 9 weekly
Lanzarote = Increases from 3 to 5 weekly.
Malaga = Increases from 27 to 35 weekly
Alicante = Increases from 14 to 22 weekly
Faro = Increases from 17 to 21 weekly

Does look like the Monarch Schedule from last summer has been Cut / Paste into BA's!

Palma has been a long time coming and has always been a missing gap in the BA Gatwick operation and it's great to see Gibraltar returning but I'm very surprised that Las Palmas is still left out of the LGW network and remains at LHR.

With Vueling pulling of the Santiago de Compostela route I was expecting BA to announce it with 2 of 3 rotations a week, Agadir could have been another possibility and a rather underserved market as far as scheduled flights are concerned other than those by EasyJet from LGW and Ryanair from STN.

The 787 issue may have certainly thrown a spanner in the works - so to cut and paste Monarch using a few Titan aircraft would certainly be the quickest and easiest thing to do.

Toldoashley

Can you please explain in a bit more detail as to what your actually referring to?

It's a national embarrasment!




You'd think so wouldn't you, the old domestic pier was a disgrace, new one appears no better.....



Says it all!

Pier 7? Has a new pier or terminal cropped up overnight? :p

I never used the old Pier 1.

Here is a link to a fairly old (2012) planning document giving outline details of what was supposed to happen.

http://www.crawley.gov.uk/pub_livx/g.../int229580.pdf

It would be interesting to find out if this is unfinished business (e.g. some further building work required somewhere between the pier and baggage reclaim), or they changed the plan and the busses are a permanent feature.

Apologies, I get confused when I have to count on my other hand too......pier *six*.
Incidentally, for anyone passing through Gatters, there are some very impressive high resolution panorama apron shots as wall panels in both terminals. One can’t help notice the odd yet strangely familiar albino A320s and A321s that have had their titles digitally removed. Oh Monarch, they’re airbrushing you away already.

Well that still doesn't have any resemblance to what you had originally posted, in fact nothing of what you wrote above was included in your original post!

In your original post there was,

No mention of Tenerife or Madeira.

No mention of two flights leaving at near enough the same time.

No mention of lack of 777's.

And obviously that's why I asked what you were actually referring to, now if you had written it correctly and included the questions above maybe and I mean maybe the original post could have been more understandable hence my post asking WTF are you on about.

Aeroflot
 

Moscow discontinued at the end of winter schedule. New flight added from Lhr.

Isn't it really strange how an airport that has been full as last 15 years always seems able to find slots to suck airlines out of Lgw over to them on just about any major route you care to think about.Seems to me that Lhr is determined never to let Lgw establish any serious foothold in medium/longhaul. I accept Lgw has better longhaul now that for many years, but think how many airlines still have been able to find a new home at Lhr.

Well yes and no.

There are barely any more slots at LHR now than there were 15 years ago, so any that have been "found" in recent years have just been redeployed from other routes.

It's called competition. :O

The new Pier 1 is even worse for the poor souls in the baggage handling unit. Too small, too many handlers competing for space that isn't there, an unreliable belt system and a loading system that encourages personal injury and bags that don't make the aircraft due to falling off en route thanks to Gatwick's awfully bumpy airside roads. The CTA arrangements, as mentioned before, are a joke. Shameful.

Gatwick Arrival from CTA
 

Gatwick has had a number of years to improve the infrastructure for arrivals from the CTA. To be honest, Manchester is the same, but at least here you don't have to climb four flights of stairs.

Do the airport authorities care, no I don't think they do, after getting soaking wet boarding a bus when on my last visit, I complained to Gatwick customer services. As a response I received.

"Thanks for contacting the team at Gatwick; I'm very sorry to hear that you're unhappy with some of the facilities and process at our airport.

Gatwick did indeed received a ministerial directive from Border Force to ensure that all CTA arriving passengers are completely segregated from international arriving passengers to eliminate the risk of border breaches. This means that we now have to treat CTA arriving passengers as domestic passengers and passengers have to be coached from the aircraft to the South Terminal domestic arrivals.

I’ve shared your comments about the South Terminal arrivals route with our Terminal Manager. I'm not aware of any imminent plans to improve the domestic arrivals route or process, but we do use passenger feedback when introducing changes so I wouldn't rule out a change for the future."

Anyone heard anything about Qatar coming back to Gatwick?

Also, are we ever going to get a link to the north west again? Easyjet have bases at both Liverpool and Manchester, seems crazy there are no routes to either.