We must be doing something right, cos they would t be returning

The word that comes to mind is crumbs.

For the avoidance of doubt, this was very much tongue in cheek

There has now got to be doubts about the long term future of Southend with a recession about to bite and other London airport planning for expansion. It seems it has lost its role as a London airport and is surplus to requirements.

I have googled the departures board and was shocked to see only 2 or 3 flights per day.

That’s on a good day. I am sure there is at least one day when that is down to a single departure. For the winter season there are no departures so I guess the terminal will be locked up, with the lighting and heating switched off.


Bizarrely, the airport will reduce its monthly losses during the winter by handling no flights than operating with its terminal open handling some flights, assuming some staff will be laid off.

Unfortunately SEN has been a victim of a shocking decade that has laid waste the airports plans from expansion to hoping for survival.

All the above posts are fair comment and I'm very pessimistic for the future of SEN. Esken have the cash for it to survive this winter and probably next summer as well but unless there is a dramatic increase in pax flights for S2023 it's hard to see where it goes from there. PitR's comment "surplus to requirements" sums up the current situation very well, unfortunately.

Sometimes businesses can fail despite doing nothing wrong. In 2019 everything was rosy for Southend, the airport was expanding fast and the talk was about grand plans for the future. Since then, we have had a pandemic, a war, inflation, that is out of control, and a pending long recession. So who saw that lot coming in 2019?

The airports business model has collapsed with no plan B so it needs to go into survival mode. Mothball the terminal, reduce the fire cover, shut the airport overnight, cut staff numbers and focus on the core businesses that have kept the airport ticking over for a generation.

In a few years time it might be time to try again but this time the infrastructure will be in place.

Was everything rosy in 2019? It was always a very constrained site, and its success seemed to be dependent on restrictions elsewhere. The difference now with earlier years is many of the ancilliary businesses have disappeared and the amount of debt that needs to be serviced

I think that on the surface things were rosy in 2019 but a danger sign was that of lot of the new routes being opened were aided by expenditure from Stobart for route development and marketing. The jury was still out as to whether all the new routes could be viable when that funding dried up. SEN's success was definitely helped by the lack of suitable slots at other LON airports at that time but who thought that would really change in the following few years? As you rightly point out many of the previous ancillary business, such as MRO, have disappeared and efforts to replace them by growing the Jet Centre business for example have met with only limited success.

It will interesting how much business the Jet Centre gets this winter once restrictions at Stansted & Luton are no longer around. If very little, then as a few suspect just crumbs again and another questionable profit centre. I don't know if they have tried to get one of the big FBOs in but the boat may have gone on that one.

I think the airport will survive BUT certainly not as a vibrant centre for passenger flights, at least for the next few years. Survival will depend upon diversification into a range of aviation related businesses (many of which SEN once had and some of those until quite recently). An unlikely series of events after 2019 showed that putting all their eggs into one basket at the expense of less high profile baskets was a disastrous mistake by management. If it wasn't for bad luck SEN would have no luck at all, but blinkered management decisions left it vulnerable - as was pointed out by several of us years ago, not least Expressflight and LTNman.

Perversely SEN may be in the strongest position this winter by not having any pax flights or staff to pay. Seriously, the costs of running just the terminal(s) at the other airports is going to be astronomical. Anyone that thinks the full current published schedules are going to run in full is living in cuckoo land. And that’s looking at the hit to household incomes in isolation, there will be other barriers hitting demand and physical ability to travel like mass strikes.

I think that's exactly what some of us may fear; that the owners may believe the airport would be in a stronger position if like Sheffield City Airport it had no...

With a flight schedule similar to now there is no economic sense in reopening the terminal next summer unless they can get a number of aircraft based at the airport. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Funnily enough this is also about the worst time to be selling land for development. There’s more prediction than usual of a fall or even collapse in house prices and you’d be brave to be investing in new industrial or retail/leisure development - not to mention how much it’ll cost to build the thing. Housebuilders will be holding back on supply as they did circa 2010. It will be fascinating to see what happens with DSA over the coming months.

The land at SEN is of course owned by the council - Esken are tenants. Peel own DSA.

This is the key point often overlooked. So long as the council wish it it will remain an airport. The other point often missed is that when Stobart came in the airport was not fit for purpose anymore. They extended the runway, build a new terminal, tower, station, car parking and made endless other expensive improvements. So now we have a small airport that is ready to go but there is an obvious problem that doesn’t look like being solved anytime soon. Right now what airline is going to base aircraft at SEN. With covid, Ukraine, cost of living crisis, Brexit (threw that one in for AP1) and who knows what next will hit the industry.

Post covid demand for flying has been remarkable but as others have pointed out it is still way short of that in 2019. Until demand looks like getting back there I cannot see too much happening at SEN.

But what can Esken do? It has been suggested that they could do without the easyjet flights next year and there is sense in that but if they give up now Esken might as well go and lay down on the middle of the field and allow the circulating vultures to swoop down and start feeding on their collective corpse.

BLUE AIR have got SEN on their web page as seasonal but no flights available to book as yet

ASL to withdraw mid September
 

RNS released by Esken this morning stating that ASL to withdraw operations from SEN by mid September.