Needs lots and lots of peripheral income. The likes of Bournemouth have a tonne of property assets generating substantial rent and as someone else pointed out here, that steady flow of non-airline business, maintenance visitors etc. Even when Doncaster was renting the big hangars, the rents were very low. Ignore the cited £10m/annum costs of running the place, add in reserves for periodic infrastructure upgrades/maintenance/replacement and that's blown out of the water.

DSA had/has plenty of asset/surrounding land, however it's property owner holding company has kept it well away from DSA's books. The only thing on the books is anything that is pure airfield and can't be easily separated out.

So the proposed CPO will be applying to take all the land that is Peel owned on the Finningley estate and not just the airport?

I had seen people mention that the car parks were under a separate Peel entity but I find that hard to believe as the revenue per passenger figures in the accounts are not going to be generated by people buying a pint and a newspaper.

If we were to use Humberside as an example, they have a relatively small plot of property land which is overwhelmingly used by aviation related business which helps keep the place ticking over. How is this any different to DSA? They had a lot of undeveloped land and dormant space on the airport site. Quite clearly they do not feel that aviation is a useful purpose for the land, and it doesn’t change the significant challenges it faces as an airport. The BOH business park accommodates mostly aviation related businesses. Big difference.

it would be reasonable to assume the CPO to include all within the boundary of the article 4 document. Airfield, Hangers, Car Park, Rail link site, ATC.

I would suspect the revenue from activity in all these areas would exceed the stated £8.4m for a similar passenger throughput to 2022.

if only 15% of PAX parked a car for a week @ £50/wk this would generate £7.2m - convinced this sits in the £8.4m? If so Peel must have been giving away almost everything else.

Under CPO rent from tenants in all aviation related areas , all ancillary activity income, and normal airport fees would come back into DSA revenue.

Interesting to note that at MME on the transition from Peel to new owners in 2019 accounts, the restated revenue for 2018 increased by 30% (PAX numbers were unchanged)

Not sure how you calculated the car parking revenue..? If half of the passengers who used the airport in the FY 22 paid £50 to park for a week I make that around £5million in revenue. Of course this is an optimistic figure.

So the land the CPO will acquire if successful is exactly the same land DavidJPowell alludes to being restrictive in its revenue potential?

Interestingly, though revenue increased with increases in passenger numbers, so too did costs and they widened the losses. So this is the complete opposite of what people seem to believe in that Peel priced themselves out of the market. Their commercial agreements were on the whole generous going by this and the other snippets of information released over the years.

I wouldn’t use MME as a benchmark for anything, Teesside Airport Foundation, anyone? Now that is one way to avoid scrutiny of the use of public money….

When I get a chance I'll try and get some shots of the airport's ownership. As ever there are layers of leases with different ownerships. Genuinely can't remember where the parking fell. However when Peel bought the site the access road did not exist, only the existing hangers Armstrong House and the building used by the private school. In the meantime Peel has been developing/selling/leasing commercial offices, sheds and residential housing. If an airport had done this it would have a thriving business to support it's airport business. However, you will find these developments are owned and developed by Peel and their subsidiaries and kept well away from the Airport Opco.

This would be one of the biggest challenges of a successful CPO. Restricted to the Article 4 land there is not much land to rely on without stealing from the airport. The same goes for a Lease really. Somehow Peel's surrounding land use needs linking to the success of the airport, but it's really not easy to do and Peel's expensive lawyers will be watching carefully.

I don’t buy this argument. Firstly the footprint of DSA as owned by the operating company is larger than other airports that are more successful. Secondly the airport simply wouldn’t exist where it not for Peel pushing for it, and you cannot support them in building it and then scrutinise their decision to buy by the acre and sell by the lot, as is always the way of a successful land and property developer. The issue I have is that people supported them to the hilt when they were promising to build the airport, it’s only when they take their ball home that everyone seems to be up in arms for them doing exactly what Peel are known for doing.

That said, the airport was not a success not for the lack of trying but for the lack of enough stakeholder buy in. Airlines did not really see it as a viable proposition from which to establish services, this also applies to freight operators. The airport relied on two airlines for the bulk of their passenger throughput, one of which was wavering in its commitment in the final year of operations. There was no scope for growth and any reduction in service levels from trying to reduce costs would have had a direct impact on the incumbent airline operations. You also cannot suggest that they didn’t explore all opportunities with airline and other aviation business as most of the major players flirted with the airport in some way during its history.

Truth is if there is not enough aviation related business to support the airport it is not thriving and never would be, instead it would be better put to other uses.

Think you missed the point when was comparing MME.

For year upto March 2022.

DSA
Passengers 403,896
Revenue £8.4m

MME
Passengers 83,921
Revenue £7.7m

The point being:

DSA had 4.8 times more passengers than MME, but DSA only had £700k extra revenue. Goes to show how much more diverse the revenue streams are at MME than DSA.

On an operating loss even greater than DSA… I don’t see your point anyway as Peel weren’t planning to close MME and they happily sold it to the Mayor as one of his pet projects with his bottomless pit of money to keep it going. Also, the Southside development was a Peel idea to be funded by selling some non-airport critical land for housing - so Peel were open to further diversification of operations to generate increases revenue.

I haven’t missed the point, I get it. My point is that clearly the demand for an aviation cluster at DSA was not sufficient and its fortunes were determined by what was going on at the other airports in the area. If anything it proves that there is not much money to be made from hosting purely holiday flights and low cost airlines these days.

If it can be discovered that car parking revenue was syphoned off by another Peel company then I may agree that there is an issue, but I do not believe that to be the case given what has previously been said. Overall Humberside makes less revenue yet it has more business on its land - an airline, an SAR operation, two hotels and a training academy amongst other things. Obviously offset by the lower passenger numbers and therefore less car parking revenue. It’s reasonable to believe therefore that the 2Excel and NPAS businesses didn’t contribute all that much and that the vast majority of the revenue reported resulted from car parking. I’m also pretty certain that Peels own master plan included further airport related development on the opposite side of the runway but there has to be demand to do so. One of the issues with attracting a sizeable freight carrier operation was being able to justify the investment in purpose built freight integrator facilities, the competition at EMA put paid to this as it was deemed a high risk proposition to speculatively invest in such a facility.

Until teams of forensic accountants go in, we can argue the toss as much as we like. The key issue is still, what's the future business plan? What would a new operator do that Peel couldn't?

"the airport was not a success not for the lack of trying but for the lack of enough stakeholder buy in. Airlines did not really see it as a viable proposition"

I presume you mean the stakeholders weren't willing to subsidise the airlines out of their oown pockets?

Why should they??

I include airlines in the stakeholder bracket. Shareholders are another matter and they are the people Peel are directly answerable to, perhaps wouldn’t look too good for Peel to be including any property in a 3 mile radius within the airport OPCO to balance the books and subsidise a loss leading venture, particularly when airline and freight uptake was minimal anyway.

So let’s suppose the Car Park revenue and all site Ground Rent (Aviation & Commercial) have been posted to Peel Property leaving literally Airfield / Terminal Ops to be posted to DSA Ltd, would you see things in a different light?

I would agree then that they haven’t explored all avenues to ensure the airport is able to cover its costs yes, but I still find it inconceivable that car parking was not a direct revenue source as highlighted in the DSAL accounts. You do not make much from people buying a pint and a paper. I still would like to know how you calculated your estimated car parking revenue in your previous post.

As an example, car parking revenue at MAN in 2019 equated to around £5.00 per passenger. Should you apply that same principle to DSA for the FY22 that would equate to around £2.4million, my estimate for £5millon based on 50% of passengers paying £50.00 to park for a week was the most optimistic assumption. That still left over £2million for other revenue streams. Revenue from ground rent for the aviation business that was on site wouldn’t have been huge.

We already know the airlines weren’t paying much to operate from there and that they were in receipt of subsidy. We also know that DSAL spent a lot of money on advertising, including the naming rights to the Sheffield arena and TV advertising which is pretty much unheard of for an airport in this region.

So on balance if you still want to believe it was designed to fail then that is your choice, but I would question your judgement.

I had taken 2022 PAX (959k) not FY22 (403k) but applied only 15% car park use

MAN is not the best example of car park revenue, there are many transport alternatives and lots of third party off site car parking. EMA is probably a better example given all the Jet Parks are EMA operated.

So you’ve used passenger numbers for the year 2022 but referenced the revenue for FY22? I should consider working on your methodology if I were you.

Car parking revenue at EMA still works out at £5.00 per passenger, pretty much the same as at MAN. At LPL for FY 22 car parking revenue per passenger was £3.60.

Another falsehood doing the rounds elsewhere and shared by someone who claims to be in possession of hitherto unreleased documents which relate to DSA not having sufficient freight integrator facilities.

The document shared looks like it paraphrases the Airport Consultative Committee meeting minutes from last year, within which RH from Peel outlines why freight wasn’t viable on a scaleable level.

This mentions DHL, but apparently doesn’t take into account Fedex, UPS, ASL and West Atlantic also utilise separate purpose built freight integrator facilities, the fairly new building on the eastern end of the airport is huge!

The reason Peel didn’t build these facilities at DSA? It’s quite simple really, there was nobody to use them and no expressions of interest!! Who in their right mind would spend millions on such a facility knowing that the airport next door already has the overwhelming share of that market cornered? The excerpt from the document that has been shared appears to confirm this.

Has 2Excel still got its office staff at Doncaster or have they also left.

Why percentage of passengers to calculate?
That is surely a flawed calculation.

For car parking revenue? Yes, so comparing and applying the per passenger revenue for other airports is a much more realistic approach in my view. Inevitably will be some variation (LPL probably lower due to location) but EMA is comparable in terms of surface access. Problem is that DSAL didn’t break up their revenue stream between Car Parking, Aviation, Other, so it allows for people to create their own conspiracies.