Unless new hub capacity is built in Europe, he says, regional routes will continue to be squeezed out of hubs.
HUBS OR HUB-NOTS... In the UK, the British Infrastructure Group (BIG), a cross-party group of MPs chaired by Grant Shapps MP, suggests improvements in rail infrastructure mean the London hub issue might become irrelevant. Once HS2 is complete, BIG said in its
Gate Now Closing July report, the catch- ment area for Birmingham and Manchester airports will be vastly expanded; for a vast swathe of the population, they will become more viable than Gatwick or Stansted, for example. The flaw in that contention is that the
traveller will have to live or work close to an HS2 station – the high-speed network will be of little use to the populations of south west England, north Wales or East Anglia. Furthermore, there are those who argue
that the UK – and England in particular – already has a superfluity of airports. As the crow flies, Bournemouth and Southampton airports are less than 25 miles apart; Liver- pool John Lennon is a similar distance from Manchester airport. Meanwhile, BIG sees the regions chal-
lenging the hub model. “Although links between UK regional airports and long-haul destinations are still small compared to
what is available in the London area, they are growing rapidly,” its report says, sug- gesting that the future lies in “a lattice of competing regional airports, rather than a London hub system”. The hub system, BIG suggests, is past its
sell-by date. When national carriers domi- nated the highly-regulated aviation world, bilateral agreements limited the number of ‘foreign’ flights allowed into a country, so airlines inevitably elected to fly to and from the most important airports. Deregulation has changed all that. ‘Foreign’ carriers – Ireland-registered Ryanair,
– some of the pressure on hubs’ capacity. There is hardly an airport in the UK that does not now have links with, for example, Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt, so some of that pressure is relieved at Heathrow. However, most regional airports cannot
support services to the key long-haul des- tinations, so regional airlines need access to hub airports to feed such flights. Up to now, that access has been hard to come by. GTMC chief executive Paul Wait high-
lights the fact that Heathrow is offering a beacon of hope. As part of its campaign to win its third runway, Heathrow Airport
“Regional airports could alleviate some of the pressure on hub airports’ capacity”
for example – can now pretty much fly to and from wherever they like. While BIG accepts that the hub model
is far from extinct, it suggests that the gov- ernment should place greater emphasis on regional airport development – either in tandem with, or independently of, that of the major gateways. As the past years’ wrangling over the siting
of south east England’s new runway has amply demonstrated, expansion at hubs will always be constrained. Regional airports, BIG argues, could alleviate – and are alleviating
UK regional update
• London City airport has recently seen Flybe launch frequent services to Cardiff and Dusseldorf. Work is due to start on the airport’s £350 million expansion project, which was given the green light in July. The project is set to increase capacity by an approximate 32,000 further flights by 2025 – movements that are already permitted.
• Belfast International is to have a new Ryanair link to London from next March, with the launch of 12 flights a week to Gatwick. Ryanair is also introducing new Belfast services to Berlin and Milan.
• Aberdeen International next year welcomes the return of Latvian low-cost
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airline Air Baltic, with a thrice- weekly service between the Granite City and Riga.
• Birmingham airport has announced a £100 million upgrade, which will include doubling its baggage processing capacity and the number of self-service bag- drop kiosks.
• Bristol airport will open new, faster ePassport gates and increase the number of immigration checkpoints next spring, as part of its £24 million terminal refurb.
• Cardiff airport managing director Debra Barber has welcomed Flybe’s “fantastic new route” to Berlin. The twice-weekly service has
been brought forward in response to demand.
• Edinburgh airport will launch the second phase of its public consultation on potential new flightpaths in the new year.
• Leeds-Bradford airport will publish is final masterplan – Route to 2030 – before the end of this year. The airport aims to more than double its passenger throughput, to 7.1 million, in the next 15 years.
• Liverpool John Lennon airport is to become Romanian low-cost carrier Blue Air’s eighth European base from next summer, when the airline will launch
new routes to Rome, Milan and Hamburg.
• Manchester airport now has a double-daily service to Bremen, courtesy of British Airways’ franchise partner Sun-Air.
• Newcastle International airport has a new Easyjet link to Berlin; and next summer sees the launch of new Ryanair services to Madrid and Warsaw, among other destinations.
• Southampton airport has a new, year-round daily service to Munich, operated by Flybe. Bmi regional launched a double-daily Southampton-Munich operation in April this year.
BBT November/December 2016 85
Holdings has offered to ring-fence part of that extra capacity for domestic routes. Perhaps it has learned a lesson from London City, which thrives on a host of feeder services from regional points – Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Isle of Man and Belfast City, Cardiff and Exeter, and Jersey and Guernsey all have London City links. It has not, of course, revealed what the
landing fees might be. However, maybe – just maybe – Plymouth-Heathrow might at some point become a reality.
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