Of course, Manchester and Birmingham airports are still regional airports themselves.
As the UK is so London-centric in much of its everyday life, including air travel, together with being a relatively small island there is always going to be a limited scope for long haul air travel in the regions.
Indeed, Manchester is the only regional airport in the entire UK that is of any significant size in terms of passengers handled and if the London routes were stripped from Edinburgh and Glasgow they would be handling about the same number of passengers as Bristol, Glasgow actually fewer.
Birmingham, given the size of its hinterland in population terms, is a poor performer when compared with Manchester. Possibly, as with Bristol, its proximity to the London airports, especially Heathrow, is a negative influence, although it might become a virtue in the future, particularly in the case of BHX, if LHR runs out of room because of the lack of a third runway.
BHX has very few intercontinental scheduled services and its CO route to Newark doesn't carry that many more passengers each month than the Bristol route, but of course raw numbers alone are not the telling factor on any airline route.
To get back on topic, the CO BRS-EWR route was started at a time (May 2005) when the airline had no access to LHR. Its London to Newark route operated out of Gatwick (which was subsequently axed when the airline began to use LHR). CO therefore decided to operate to secondary, even tertiary (in some people's view) airports in the UK to overcome their inability to access the UK's major airport.
Bristol was chosen because of its proximity to the capital, its large business base and very big reservoir of well-off leisure travellers with a propensity to fly (and a very able and persuasive senior management team) - incidentally broadly the same reasons that led to Go making the airport its second base and easyJet building on it when Go was bought.
The first year exceeded CO's expectations (publicly announced but one sometimes cynically suspects that airlines deliberately underplay their hopes for a new route so they can then celebrate if it proves more successful, apart from Ryanair who seem to go the opposite way) and the summer periods have been generally well patronised. The problem has been the winters, away from pre-Christmas shopping weeks and Christmas/New Year, when loads were disappointing in January and February particularly. Furthermore, there was a suggestion that there were too few full-fare business-first passengers at times.
My own view, and it is supported by some in the industry, is that once CO gained access to LHR their Bristol route was always on borrowed time, and as they gained more slots (as they have) it was a near certainty it would go, however well it had been performing.
Many regular flyers, especially business passengers, also preferred LHR because though BRS-EWR was fine for the New York area it entailed a sometimes longish wait to change aircraft at Newark, whereas just along the M4 was a selection of non-stop flights from many carriers to all sorts of destinations in North America.
Given its small site, short runway, challenging weather conditions at times and poor road links (no rail), together with several other airports within reasonable distance including LHR of course, it might be considered quite a feat that BRS has managed to get itself up to the vicinity of 6 mppa (it comfortably exceeded 6 mppa in 2008 before the recession took hold) with a determination to get well beyond that.
One can only imagine what sort of airport the city would have now if the city fathers had chosen Filton instead of Lulsgate when Whitchurch became too small in the 1950s – it's not fanciful to imagine a throughput closer to 10 mppa than 6.
Filton has most of the attributes that Lulsgate lacks, and although recent housing developments have reduced the size of of its site it still remains better situated than BRS.
