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ttglive.com/air Profile Brad Miller, managing director, East Midlands airport
From terror alerts to meal vouchers...
The new boss of East Midlands airport trained as a surveyor but has already coped with a terrorist alert and is predicting a future in leisure. He talks to Chris Gray
T
he first few weeks in a new job are always tricky, but Brad Miller faced a bigger challenge than most after he joined East Midlands airport as
managing director. Four weeks into the job he found himself at the centre of an international terrorism scare when an explosive device was detected in a cargo aircraft at the airport. A chartered surveyor by training, Miller did not
start his career expecting to be in charge of the response to a terrorist incident. But he says the procedures at the airport meant his staff gave a “fantastic” response that the Department for Transport described as a textbook example of how to handle such an incident. “It was a chance to show a bit of leadership, which hopefully I did, but it was the combined effort of the team that made it work,” he says. “We learned lots of little lessons from it, but fundamentally, if it happened again, we would not do anything different.”
Back to basics
Cargo is vital to East Midlands as it one of the UK’s key freight hubs, but Miller has his eyes on the leisure market as he looks to the future. He joined the airport from within the Manchester Airport Group – he was previously projects and pro- curement director at Manchester airport – and one of his first actions after being promoted to East Mid-
22 26.11.2010 Miller is looking to get more agents using East Midlands
lands boss was to start a complete review to ask what the airport was there to do. “We went back to first principles because of me being new to the airport, to ask what we do, what we stand for,” he says. “What adjectives do we want people to use to describe the airport? “Our neighbour Birmingham is strong in business traffic and sees itself as the fifth or sixth London airport. It may be that our differentiator is our focus on the leisure market. We have got great no-frills and charter routes, so maybe we say we are the leisure airport for the Midlands.” Such a strategy is possible despite the loss of easyJet in January when the airline said it could not make its East Midlands routes viable. Miller says a new chief
executive and new direction at the airline could lead to a rethink of its East Midlands assessment. And even if it does not the
East Midlands faces a leisure-driven future
airport still has Thomson, Jet2, bmibaby and Ryanair recording good load factors.
cgray@ttglive.com
020 7921 8003 Chris Gray
Its passenger traffic is still well below its 2007 peak of 5.6 million – it is now around 4.5 million – but Miller says it is starting to grow again. “We are looking at strong forecasts for next summer, so we may have gone past the bottom of the market,” he says. “There are green shoots from Heathrow that are about business traffic, but that is a good indication for the industry.” Miller also detects a move back to charter flights and away from no-frills. The trend is “not massive”, he admits, but could reflect a shift back to package holidays due to the uncertainty cre- ated by the ash cloud crisis and 2010’s failures.
Pulling in passengers For Miller, revitalising passenger numbers does not mean taking them from competitor airports, but is about encouraging more people to fly by improving the whole experience, including the shopping and dining experiences at airports. “We all have to compete to attract the people
who are spending their leisure time in ways other than flying abroad on holiday – and not just against each other,” he says. On his wish list for achieving the development the airport hopes for are more onward connec- tions to European hubs. East Midlands only has onward connections at Brussels, where BMI connects with Star Alliance carriers. Bmibaby flies to Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam Schiphol, but it has no onward connections. Miller would like to see this changed to plug the airport more fully into the global air network and stop a lot of the “leakage” of passengers in its catchment that travel longer distances to Birmingham or London for long-haul flights. Targets for direct routes are the US, but also India to cater for the potentially huge VFR market in Leicestershire’s Indian communities who travel to airports further from their homes. MAG group has worked hard on its trade
relations, and Miller says he will continue this now East Midlands has a dedicated managing director. His predecessor, Penny Coates, also oversaw Bournemouth and Humberside airports. He wants to encourage agents in his region to use the airport themselves, so they can pass the experience on to clients. And his team is consid- ering what incentives can make that happen. It will be January or February before decisions
are made, but options under consideration include offering agents priority parking, express lanes or meal vouchers. One thing he hopes they will not experience is another security shutdown. But if it happens, he and his team are ready.
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