I wonder how many passengers on the route, self transfer to other destinations ?
I met a family of five, that flew CAX-SEN bussed to STN then on to MEL with EK.

I also talked to an elderly Canadian couple a few months back, at Carlisle train station, who asked me how much further South is London Southend Airport compared to London Gatwick :eek:.

They'd have found the train to Newcastle a bit more scenic! :eek:

Sorry, should have added, they were going to a wedding in Australia, and were meeting other family members from Chelmsford and all flying together, from Stansted.
makes more sense now :rolleyes:.

Yes that makes sense. I know a fair few punters are transitioning thru BHD to connect onwards

Belfast Harbour to where?

still..12 per flight to Southend won’t last long?

treading water I’m afraid...

Has to be debatable allowing for a 1 hour train trip from London to Southend plus a 2 hour recommended check-in time whether catching a random plane is better than an hourly train service. Saying that I have flown Luton to Liverpool just for the novelty value.

NCL maybe? Beats a bus service hands down.

The train is very scenic - and there is no air service from BHD to NCL...

LM have already dropped there flights from SEN to GLA, with ABZ being dropped in April. With loads like that I wonder if CAX will last through till the end of the summer.

Does anyone know how long the agreement with NYX to operate from CAX is for?.

Oh, the good old days when I flew NCL to BHD in a Gill Air Shed.

I'm off to a conference in London in 2 months.. I was looking forward to using the Loganair route from CAX.. but unfortunately the conference is on a Wednesday. I'd need to fly down on the Monday morning to make it :ugh:

Not exactly business friendly.

That is always the problem with a thin route. The feasibility study will consider flight frequency in terms of the possible and expected market together with the profitability forecasts for the various permutations, with different sizes of aircraft if that is a possibility. A 'useful to all' schedule may be attempted but then that blasted nuisance 'reality' makes an appearance. That's really what has happened to CAX-SEN with the frequencies being reduced to the best comprise between frequency and revenue that appears sustainable.

On the other hand I live in Essex and happened to have a meeting in Carlisle on a Monday. Of course I had to get the train back, but the outbound was perfect (and saved me time, money).

There are no commercial flights on Tuesday and Wednesday. I believe this is to enable a minimum number of dedicated aviation staff - in particular ATC - to be employed on a 5 day week.

When flights were first announced back in 2018 LM planned to operate daily to both BHD & DUB and 13 x weekly to SEN this schedule would have been much more appealing to business passengers. These passengers are far more likely to pay a premium to use the service than the current leisure passengers that are mostly using the routes.

It will be interesting to see what effect if any BE’s up to 2 x daily NCL-SEN service starting later this month will have on LM’s CAX-SEN service.
This is something that needs to change if CAX are serious about making the airport a success.

For a start there are not masses of businesses located around Carlisle as the population is quite small and of those businesses that are there how many sheep farmers, hotel and shop owners are wanting to fly to Southend when there is a flexible hourly train service that goes straight into London? This is a service aimed at other markets.

And when the flights were re-introduced over a year later, a different schedlue was introduced - I wonder why (I'll give you a clue, the flights were pulled at the last minute after they'd been on sale for several months)

Finding out whether it was true might be a start...

Despite his characteristically skewed world view, I think LTNman is on the right track (no pun intended!) :ok:

Not sure what you are getting at. The initial launch was postponed as ATC at CAX wasn't ready and approved for commercial ops. That was a matter of fairly wide comment here at the time.

The timetable was set up for the launch last year to fit within available ATC resources. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has changed.

That is what reported at the time:
https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/1...airport-delay/

From what I had heard advance booking for the initial launch were good.

I'm well aware of the curious case of the missing controllers (why did nobody notice?). The point I'm making is this - there are significant differences between version 1 of the schedule for 2018 and version 2 of the schedule for 2019, with the SEN route in particular being drastically reduced. Is that really down to operational restrictions or did somebody have a good look at the bookings leading up to the abandoned 2018 launch and then decide to change the game plan?