Bournemouth-5
 

I hope BOH is talking to Wizz about returning to BOH with an operational base for 2021. It's been 13 years since they were last at BOH and the anecdotal population of Hungarian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech and Romanian has grown hugely locally so I can only see it being more successful for them. Especially given they have a limited operation at LGW. A BOH or SOU base would compete very well for catchment from LGW, BRS, EXT, LHR.

IF they get their extension, my money would be on SOU for a single aircraft base!

​​​It makes sense for Wizz to return to Bournemouth,it has the runway,it has a large catchment of Eastern possible PAX,and it has a local catchment of retired Sun seekers.
SOU doesn't have the runway,and it's highly debatable if it will get the extension.Wizz could comfortably have two aircraft based at Bournemouth within the next 18 months
given Covid is under control.

RW20 - Wizz at BOU could be an option although if SOU get the extension, will this not enable A320 ops and they must surely have the larger catchment (not knowing the area)?

After watching tonight’s BBC 1 programme about climate change it would be better if there were less flights than more flights. It won’t be long before there is a government crackdown on aviation seeing they are picking on other sectors of UK life. Airports like Bournemouth could be on borrowed time as airlines retreat to larger airports as taxes force a reduction in demand.

Would you rather more people drove in their cars to London to take flights to the same destinations?

Cars will be electric but I am just saying that the unpalatable truth is that the ever increasing amount of flights in normal times will have to end and in fact be cut back if the UK is to meet its emissions commitments and airports like Bournemouth would loose out. The way this will happen is through taxes to suppress demand. This would force consolidation back to the bigger airports.

Pain in the R's

Actually, the reverse is more likely. In the short term (2-3 years) slot sitting at the larger airports will constrain growth, the result will be more flights from regions. Recent announcements by both Wizz at Cardiff and Jet2 at Bristol are evidence of this. We know Wizz wants to grow at Gatwick and can't, the CEO has been clear why. Michael O'Leary has said similar about growth this week and slot sitting.

Longer term, a crack down on night flights especially at London's airports can be expected, as can some kind of resilience cap on movements to reduce the amount of extra routing an holding that characterizes ops at the busier airports. There is already evidence that this will happen (building back greener). The governments leveling up agenda will have an impact too, pushing the jobs and economic activity away from London into the regions.

Lastly, ten years from now most of us can expect to be driving electric vehicles anyway.

Totally agreed - seems like everyone forgets that aviation contributes less than 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions and that hasn’t changed over the last 30years despite the massive growth in flights and passengers carried

The percentage may have remained the same, however the tonnage will have increaed massively.

That is not to belittle the technical advances that enabled exponential rises in traffic, whilst not increasing aviation's relative damage to the environment.

EGC
 

Seems Ryanair aren’t too happy BACF are setting up on their doorstep...

BOU clearly aren’t happy with the SOU threat, especially if the runway gets approval, and this has already been made very obvious with the objecting letters they have sent to the deciding council

Could almost see this one coming, question is, how many more competition routes will RYN start up?

EGC was pretty-much a daily route for Flybe in Summer, albeit on 78 seat Dashes.

BACF will only fly it a max of 2 weekly on the Embraer, so probably plenty of room for some more capacity on the route.

BACF are actually operating 3 times weekly between SOU and EGC (Tue, Sat, Sun) and have radically reduced their fares since the Ryanair announcement from BOH. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

SKOJB

Quite the opposite it would seem now BACF are cutting there own prices.

SOU runway extension.
 

So as much as I love both SOU and BOH one has to ask if more jobs would be created by having one larger airport for the entire region to rival BRS or NCL?

The only apparent issue with BOH’s capabilities is its public transport but this can be fixed with the flick of a switch by serving Southampton on say an hourly National Express style basis. If BOH had a 5am to 23:00 shuttle service to the Bournemouth train station it would also catapult BOH immediately into similar territory to BRS’s public transport capabilities.

So then you have to ask surely a consolidated airport for the whole of the south would benefit us all in terms of economic prosperity and inbound tourism? Certainly environmentally it would be better to have a consolidated site.

Both airports already seem to be sharing functions for example: whenever football teams fly in and out, so the 29mile distance between the two is acceptable to people & business it seems. I’m sorry but the more I think about this the more sense it makes. How on earth can two successful airports survive within 29miles of each other with a catchment population of only 2 or 3 million?

Irish Cream - you clearly have no idea about the local area, you would miss every BOH flight with an hourly bus service from SOU in the summer months due to dreadful traffic holdups across the New Forest. In any case it seems BOH is becoming rather cargo centric for its future!

This conversation is not new I am afraid and your ideas have been discussed so many times over the years on the SOU and BOH thread

At the moment most UK airports are fighting for survival including the two here in the south
Lets see what happens now we have a clearer road map

I personally really really want to see services to Abu Dhabi/Dubai (Etihad/Emirates) and/or Istanbul (Turkish Airlines) for world-wide connections. I don't fly on KLM via AMS - they never have good connections to Asia or the Far-East and air-fares tend to be way too high. BOH has the potential to offer this to people in the local area, not even BRS can do that with their runway limitation. That's assuming Emirates and Turkish would ever be interested in doing it hahaha. I doubt they would, given our own proximity to LHR.

Irish Cream, you're brave starting a SOU v BOH post :ugh: It would probably be better for the two airports to work together somehow to ensure both survive... One example of this could be the sharing ground handling staffing/equipment or even a shared/consolidated remote air-traffic control team etc etc?