TheLocalYokel
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Bristol Post and Bristol Airport
There have been ongoing comments about the negativity towards Bristol Airport often portrayed in the Trinity Mirror-owned Bristol Post. This newspaper doesn’t seem to have a business correspondent or business editor who is prepared to proactively research and discuss the airport, especially its position as both a driver and mirror of the local economy.
Instead it relies on airport press releases which it invariably publishes verbatim but with one of its reporters as the apparent author. These are the only occasions when the airport might be shown in some sort of positive light. Another method is to set their (mainly young) reporters surfing the Internet, both social media and the airport’s own web site, to try to dig out what are invariably matters that are not to the airport’s credit. Typical of this are the days when weather or other circumstances conspire to divert aircraft to other airports, yet the Bristol Post never reports those occasions when other airports are closed and Bristol receives inbound diversions.
In 2009, the last time that Bristol Airport saw a reduction in passenger numbers, the Post would report monthly on yet another fall in passenger numbers, and this was under the previous newspaper ownership. Since then Bristol has been the only UK top ten airport to see annual passenger number rises every year from 2010 onwards yet the Post remains blissfully silent on each monthly gain year after year. I’m just waiting for the first month to show a decrease and can almost guarantee that the Post’s intrepid Internet explorers will discover this juicy titbit through the airport facts and figures website section and highlight the drop.
The third way the Post writes about the airport is in publishing complaints made directly to it from aggrieved passengers about some subject or other.
Unfortunately, the local tv and radio news people do very little proactively regarding the airport either, although they don’t seem as uniformly negative as the Post.
So is Bristol Airport as bad as the local paper often seems to suggest? I’ve been using it as a passenger for over 40 years from the days it was a tiny airfield with very few flights. It’s not perfect - nowhere near - and anyway perfection is subjective and in the eyes of the beholder. I’ve yet to find the perfect airport and I doubt that I ever will.
Bristol Airport was dealt a poor hand by the city council in the 1950s, moving one problem at Whitchurch to another at Lulsgate. The Lulsgate site is constricted with too short a runway; is set amongst the Green Belt; it suffers from poor weather and inadequate surface connectivity.
Yet its growth of the past 20 years almost defies belief and gives Topsy a run for her money, albeit the airport’s growth is more controlled. From 500,000 passengers a year 30 years ago, from two million at the beginning of the century to the current 8.2 million which will likely be well over 8.5 million by the end of this year, with management now looking at 15-20 million a year by the 2040s, the only barrier will be the airport itself.
Because of its runway limitations and management’s reluctance extend it Bristol will almost certainly remain primarily a short-haul airport, unless future technology brings about VTOL or STOL airliners. Even as a short-haul airport it will need expansion into the surrounding Green Belt to enable room to be found for 15-20 million passengers a year, yet that would mean some form of dilution of the Green Belt. The airport recognises this dichotomy in its master plan consultation document, the first responses to which are now being collated and studied.
There is no doubt whatever that Bristol punches well above its weight, particularly having regard to its physical limitations. Its success is due in part to the quality of its senior management in the past, and the hard work of those further down the pecking order. I sense a subtle switch in recent years to bringing in more ‘corporate’ people in the higher levels of management. I am sure they are very capable in their own fields and I hope they have aviation in their blood a characteristic that has served the airport so well for so long.
Bristol Airport is very fortunate in serving one of the most economically vibrant city regions in the UK and also has many often older leisure travellers within its catchment with the means, time and desire to travel. It also sits conveniently near a national motorway and rail ‘crossroads’ (although not so near as to make surface connectivity simple) and is able to attract substantial numbers of passengers from other sub-regions. Bristol Airport’s critical mass has led to the economy of scale that has attracted airlines. Barbara Cassani, CEO of GoFly, made that very point and Bristol Airport was fortunate that GoFly became part of easyJet, the airline that carries over 50% of Bristol’s passenger traffic. There is an ever present risk though of relying too heavily on one customer.
An incontrovertible fact is that Bristol Airport has a much bigger route network than some airports that serve considerably larger populations, although it's served by relatively few airlines. It has had first-class senior management and supportive owners (who are rewarded by owning an extremely profitable airport) for many years and in some aviation quarters is looked upon almost as a model of what a small airport can be.
It cannot stand on its laurels so let us hope that the new master plan when published in final form will turn out to be as accurate as the current one which is now over a decade old. It showed remarkable prescience in many of its projections especially (at the time) a jaw-dropping forecast as to how far passenger numbers would rise but, as with stocks and shares, past success is no guide to the future.
My conclusion is that the Bristol Post does not serve its local airport well and in a sense it undermines it. Too often its negative stance leads local people, most of whom have no general interest in aviation, to really believe that their airport is no more than a fogbound airstrip in a field deep in the countryside with few flights. This perception is regularly reflected in public comments when the airport features in one of the Post's 'articles'.
Let’s have informed and reasoned criticism by all means, but let it be balanced and in context. I’d love to read well-researched articles about the airport in the local press and local tv/radio, but unfortunately the local news media seems unable or unwilling to provide such debate.
#BristolPostandBristolAirport #bristolairport #bristolpost #positivelybristol
