London City capacity
 

I had the good fortune to spend a nice hour in the sunshine yesterday lunchtime at London City (LCY) airport and counted 20 aircraft on the ground, not including the private jets. There was a lot of movements, both landing and taking off during the hour, but still the +-20 number remained which visually seemed to be the capacity of the apron. Is LCY at full capacity these days ?


SHJ

The current parking/docking chart only shows 18 stands + the GA apron.

There were a couple of aircraft being serviced not at a gate, but at a remote point.


SHJ

LCY has always been pretty much at capacity as far as parking on the stands goes, hence the reason they charge a horrendous amount to night stop. We often had aircraft parking at Farnborough having dropped off their passengers at City.

At one stage the DHC-8-Q400 could only access its stand via an adjacent vacant stand because of undercarriage issues. That, in itself, must have had a huge impact on airport capacity.

I think Stand 11 was withdrawn taking it to 17 less the Jet Centre.

LCY floated plans a year or so ago for replacing the current stands to the west of the terminal with new stands built over KGV Dock. Although that would not increase the overall number of stands, they would allow larger aircraft to be accommodated.

Update:

"London City Airport is expected to apply for planning permission by the end of April, early May for new stands to the east of the airport and a parallel taxiway to allow for an increase of maximum movements. It has already been approved for an annual figure of 120,000 movements per year, substantially above the current 70,000.

Key to the airport expansion is the introduction of the Bombardier C series aircraft, with accommodation for up to 130 passengers. The new Canadian aircraft is due to be operated by at least SWISS in 2015, and will open up a whole series of airports hitherto not within the range of the current Embraer and Avro aircraft, the backbone of the airport. However it will not fit into the current stands."

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