The entire thinking behind routes such as WestJet and Qatar is fundamentally flawed. Cardiff Airport and the Welsh Government seem to treat long-haul connectivity as the holy grail of aviation and economic investment on the assumption that simply having direct links to North America, the Middle East and Asia will somehow magically generate investment and high-value tourism. There is no evidence to support that perverse assumption.
Take WestJet. Anecdotally, there appears to be very little North American inbound demand on these flights. The service will not generate any meaningful level of investment into Wales, nor significant numbers of wealthy North American tourists coming to Wales as their primary destination.
For international visitors, Wales is realistically part of a wider UK trip than a destination in itself. A tourist from Canada or the United States is far more likely to fly into London, spend time there and perhaps visit Wales for a few days alongside other destinations. If the objective is to increase inbound tourism, aggressively marketing Wales to the millions of international passengers already arriving through Heathrow would deliver a better return than subsidising a niche flight into Cardiff.
In practice, the WestJet service is less of an inbound economic-development tool and more of a subsidised holiday route for the middle class.
The Qatar argument is similar. A Doha connection sounds impressive on a route map, but prestige is not the same thing as economic impact. If most passengers are Welsh residents connecting through Doha to destinations in Asia, Australia or elsewhere, then public support is effectively helping middle-class Welsh consumers travel abroad more conveniently. That may be nice for those passengers, but it is difficult to argue that it fundamentally strengthens the Welsh economy.
This becomes even more obvious when you consider the most common explanation given for Cardiff Airport's historic weakness: its poor catchment area.
If Cardiff really does suffer from a weak catchment, then the question should be why that catchment is weak. A major part of the answer is that Wales simply does not have enough highly paid jobs nor enough people with the relevant skills to sustain high paying jobs.
There are pockets of highly paid employment: senior roles at Admiral, doctors and other medical professionals, lawyers, engineers, specialist manufacturing roles and a small number of people working in niche positions. But these jobs are not present at anything like the scale seen in stronger regions of the UK. Wales suffers from a lack of economic opportunity. Many ambitious young people leave for England because the range of graduate careers, professional jobs and progression opportunities is substantially greater. At the same time, much of the inward investment celebrated in Wales consists of low-paid employment such as call centres and back-office functions. That creates jobs, which is obviously better than creating nothing, but it does very little to transform Wales and grow wealth in the country.
That is why the airport strategy should work in the opposite direction. Rather than asking how the existing Welsh economy can support a prestige long-haul network, the airport should be treated as part of the infrastructure needed to build a stronger Welsh economy in the first place.
Aviation is in the top five highest paying industries. It supports a wide range of very well-paid employment: pilots, engineers, air traffic controllers, operations staff, airline management, maintenance, logistics, ground handling and numerous technical and professional roles. If Cardiff Airport became significantly busier, demand for those jobs would increase around the airport and across South Wales. Cardiff Airport, and companies closely linked to the airport, would become major employers in Wales, directly increasing the wealth of South Wales (you also then have greater tax revenues which helps support everyone else too).
To achieve that, the immediate priority should be passenger volume rather than glamour. Cardiff should be an exceptionally cheap and commercially attractive airport for airlines to operate from. Reduce the cost of operating there to practically nothing, encourage carriers to base aircraft there, and concentrate on building a dense network of routes that people will actually use in large numbers.
The airport can then make money from the activity those passengers generate: parking, retail, food and drink, advertising, premium services and other ancillary income. A full 737 or A320 to Alicante, Dublin or Amsterdam may look far less exciting in a government press release than a trip to Doha or Canada, but ten high-frequency short-haul routes carrying 180 passengers will do far more for the airport's viability, employment base and wider economic ecosystem than Qatar.
The objective should therefore be simple: build scale first.
More passengers create more flights. More flights justify aircraft being based at Cardiff. Based aircraft create permanent operational and technical jobs. A larger aviation sector then creates skills, supply chains and economic activity around it. That is a much more credible route to using Cardiff Airport as an economic-development tool than chasing prestigious long-haul routes and hoping that investment and wealthy tourists somehow follow.
This contradicts your entire narrative on pprune and above. Most of the things you've dragged up are historic failings of the airport. Most of which people wouldn't disagree with you on.
QR and BE were failed attempts at growth. But its confined to the history books.
But your attacks on CWL, which lets call it out, is what they are, are attacks on historic failings not what is happening now.
The past failings are very relevant because the ethos has not changed. Management, past and present, is obsessed with chasing long haul routes over footfall that makes money and creates jobs. Three of the top 10 busiest UK airports do not have long haul connections. Long haul is not the solution. It's not even part of it.
Cardiff Airport needs to focus on passenger footfall and numbers. The current management do not seem to be aiming to do this, just like the past management did not. The argument about the catchment area not sustaining an airport doesn't work because people travel miles for cheap flights. They do not care about where the airport is. Cardiff Airport can undercut Bristol all it likes. There is nothing Bristol can do about it. We all know Ryanair will moves flights to Cardiff for a bargain and the passengers will still use them.
