Lack of use by the locals who wouldn’t pay the fare rates, so service pulled simple economics really, same for the On/off AerLingus offerings and the lamented BMA services to Heathrow and Frankfurt.

And this is the reality being deliberately ignored by politicians and vested interests at HAL.

Shout all they like about R3 and ring fenced domestic access without PSO grants the services won’t ever develop.

For the most part they don’t exist today because they aren’t viable- in fact never were !
Cambrian and North East made losses to the point of the BA merger, The Twin Otter and Shed services over the 70 and 80s carrierd literally 10s ! of high fare paying passengers at huge loses as well.

Over all the numbers of inter line passengers that might make use of these mythical future domestic hub and spoke feeder services top out at perhaps 100,000.

That’s a drop in the ocean at Heathrow today and adds relatively few passengers to any of the half dozen potential UK regionals

Once again domestic air connectivity is a smoke screen.

Further some of the UK politicians are utterly naive in their actual understandings of Hub and Spoke models and their actual complexities, and competitive markets.

Heathrow is Europe’s largest One World Hub serving just about anywhere except South and Central American markets where Madrid steps in.
IAG group AA CX MH QR AY JL JJ QF feed each other with BA the distributors around the whole of Europe indeed they get a better return collecting an Italian business person from Milan and onward to Austin than a Yorkshire business person to Chicago.

Competing hubs all have this effect .

Unless British carriers somehow gain access to Heathrow and membership of Star what advantage is there in putting anyone on a domestic leg with a competitor rather than lifting them directly to Frankfurt Munich Brussels or Zurich - NONE

Sky team similarily via Amsterdam and Paris.

These fundamentals do NOT change when Brexit is delivered , it’s the way the European Legacy Hub and Spokes have developed and fortified over decades.
 
What was the reason that Liverpool lost it's KLM link? As they seem to be able to maintain links at other airports which i quite close together.


I don't recall exactly now as the route was due to go from 3 to 4 per day. It was rather strange decision. I flew on it a few time and it was well supported. It had nothing to do with locals not paying the fare.
Maybe it will return.
 
I don't recall exactly now as the route was due to go from 3 to 4 per day. It was rather strange decision. I flew on it a few time and it was well supported. It had nothing to do with locals not paying the fare.
Maybe it will return.
It is a strange one as they seem to maintain flights at much smaller airports than Liverpool.
 
Carl numbers said different Again lack of the high fare payers.

Humberside and Teesside are maintained by a very healthy Royal Dutch Shell contract .
Walk up fares are shocking
 
The main issue LPL has is how close MAN is to the eastern end of Liverpool. So much catchment overlap...
 
I think the bigger issue is probably easyJet - they offer cheaper fares than KLM meaning easyJet will typically be the choice for city breakers leaving KLM with just the transit passengers. These possibly aren't enough to warrant a service from KLM. I expect if easyJet didn't operate LPL to Amsterdam, KLM would be in there with multiple daily flights.

Cardiff is a similar distance to Bristol that Liverpool is to Manchester and KLM serve both BRS & CWL (easyJet also serves BRS, and KLM is the only carrier operating CWL - AMS). With Liverpool being a similar size city to Cardiff, I think there's sufficient demand there, just not for 2 carriers, which is a shame as easyJet doesn't offer connections onto KLM's long haul network at AMS.

KLM flies to 16 airports in the UK, 9 of which are smaller than Liverpool - pretty sure the demand is there...

EDIT: Also worth adding that Liverpool lacks a connection to a hub with an airline offering through connections onto a long haul network. Trying to book a flight from LPL to New York through Skyscanner and the top result is a self connection in Rome!

Back to the earlier point - if BA provided a domestic link to Liverpool, it'd probably do OK as it allows for transfers that current airlines flying from Liverpool don't. At LBA, BA has to compete with KLM and Aer Lingus for transiting pax.
 
I agree the demand is there in LPL's
catchment, but that catchment is substantially overlapped by MAN's catchment which gravitates towards MAN. This situation doesn't really exist at any of the other UK regionals KLM flies to.

I don't know if Cardiff-Bristol is a similar distance to Liverpool-Manchester or not, but it is certainly easier to travel between the later because the Severn estuary isn't there. Also, the size gap between Cardiff-Bristol is nothing like the size gap between Liverpool-Manchester.
 
Also, the size gap between Cardiff-Bristol is nothing like the size gap between Liverpool-Manchester.

In terms of airport size or city size?

Airports wise, MAN is 5.4 times bigger than LPL, whilst BRS is 5.7 times bigger than CWL.

In terms of city size, yes Bristol and Cardiff are similar, certainly more so than Manchester and Liverpool. But then again Bristol and Cardiff combined is 32% bigger than Liverpool, yet they have almost 250% more weekly flights to Amsterdam. Combined, the populations of Manchester and Liverpool are double that of Cardiff/Bristol, yet they only have 67% more weekly flights. Surely that demonstrates a weak link at Liverpool?

The argument of overlapping catchment I accept for long haul - it happens to pretty much every airport within 100 miles of MAN & LHR - not so sure it works so much for short haul. Sure it still comes into play, but not to such a greater extent. I'd feel OK driving over an hour to MAN/LHR for a direct long haul rather than a one stop option from my local airport. Not so OK if I was only going to Spain say.
 
In terms of airport size or city size?

Airports wise, MAN is 5.4 times bigger than LPL, whilst BRS is 5.7 times bigger than CWL.

In terms of city size, yes Bristol and Cardiff are similar, certainly more so than Manchester and Liverpool. But then again Bristol and Cardiff combined is 32% bigger than Liverpool, yet they have almost 250% more weekly flights to Amsterdam. Combined, the populations of Manchester and Liverpool are double that of Cardiff/Bristol, yet they only have 67% more weekly flights. Surely that demonstrates a weak link at Liverpool?

The argument of overlapping catchment I accept for long haul - it happens to pretty much every airport within 100 miles of MAN & LHR - not so sure it works so much for short haul. Sure it still comes into play, but not to such a greater extent. I'd feel OK driving over an hour to MAN/LHR for a direct long haul rather than a one stop option from my local airport. Not so OK if I was only going to Spain say.
It's more to do with city region size than actual city populations isn't it? Populations are described in so many different ways these days: municipal city; urban area; metropolitan area; city region; larger urban zone (EU).

For example, Bristol as a city, a physical city that is, is bigger than many people think. Its municipal population is currently around 450,000 but the unbroken urban area is closer to 700,000. The reason is that the city's boundaries have not been enlarged since the early 1960s but the urban sprawl has grown and grown into neighbouring areas, especially into the unitary authority of South Gloucestershire which is a 'city' with 200,000 residents physically joined - you can't see the join - to municipal Bristol. Physical (unbroken urban area) Bristol is over 50% bigger than physical Cardiff population-wise, but when it comes to the EU larger urban zone (LUZ) measurement the two are much closer because neighbouring towns and cities that are associated with the main one are taken into account.

Remaining with AMS as an example, is the difference so striking that in 2016 BRS handled 408,000 on the AMS route and CWL 135,000? BRS has 28 weekly KLM Cityhopper E190 flights as well as up to 12 weekly easyJet flights whilst CWL has 21 weekly KLM Cityhopper flights, many on the smaller E170. Actually the ratio on this route is much closer than the ratio of overall passenger numbers at these airports, but the differential still seems difficult to fathom even taking into account the size and make-up of the core and wider catchments of both.

Cardiff is also a capital city; Bristol is not.

Taking the 2011 census figures coupled with the EU's LUZ concept, Manchester/Liverpool population is over 3.5 million whilst Bristol/Cardiff is around 2 million with, it is true, a far greater bias towards Manchester whereas the Bristol/Cardiff LUZs are fairly even in population size.

In the end, I suppose it's down to airlines knowing/thinking/believing/hoping what works best for them at any given airport.
 
In terms of airport size or city size?

Airports wise, MAN is 5.4 times bigger than LPL, whilst BRS is 5.7 times bigger than CWL.

In terms of city size, yes Bristol and Cardiff are similar, certainly more so than Manchester and Liverpool. But then again Bristol and Cardiff combined is 32% bigger than Liverpool, yet they have almost 250% more weekly flights to Amsterdam. Combined, the populations of Manchester and Liverpool are double that of Cardiff/Bristol, yet they only have 67% more weekly flights. Surely that demonstrates a weak link at Liverpool?



The argument of overlapping catchment I accept for long haul - it happens to pretty much every airport within 100 miles of MAN & LHR - not so sure it works so much for short haul. Sure it still comes into play, but not to such a greater extent. I'd feel OK driving over an hour to MAN/LHR for a direct long haul rather than a one stop option from my local airport. Not so OK if I was only going to Spain say.


I think LPL could do with a bit more capacity on both the Amsterdam and Paris route by easyjet with the extra capacity they are adding in 2018, maybe we will see some extra schedules. They still have gaps to fill, so will see. Someone mentioned if KLM had the route to themselves they would probably still be there, I'd agree with that, and although they offered transfer connections, Easyjet are often cheaper and not forgetting they had been operating the route for many years before KLM, so better known.
 
I agree the demand is there in LPL's
catchment, but that catchment is substantially overlapped by MAN's catchment which gravitates towards MAN. This situation doesn't really exist at any of the other UK regionals KLM flies to.

I don't know if Cardiff-Bristol is a similar distance to Liverpool-Manchester or not, but it is certainly easier to travel between the later because the Severn estuary isn't there. Also, the size gap between Cardiff-Bristol is nothing like the size gap between Liverpool-Manchester.

I think these days both Liverpool and Manchester Airports compliment one another. Liverpool Airport won't ever get to the Manchester size but it does offer extra choice now which it really didn't before to LoCos. Resulting in increased convenience for Northwest passengers, without need of driving way out of the Northwest area.
 
With the year ending I'm wondering what 2018 will bring. Brexit is round the corner and people from Eastern European countries are starting to leave, it's likely to affect flights to those routes....or maybe not still don't know what we will end up with , could be a lot like what we have now in the EU, just not in it.
 
Out of interest, has LPL got Cat3 now on R27?
Reason I ask is that the metars from 08.50 to 10.20 inclusive all gave RVR's <300m yet a/c landed. Again, the 11.50 metar showed 200m RVR. Or have flights just been lucky in that the RVR has gone up in between the metar times? Not even noticed Easyjet or Ryanair having to hold.
 
CATIII is installed but used on a trial basis a the moment. Only one aircraft has diverted away today, that being a Biz jet not CATIII rated.
 
Although I haven't personally seen or heard this Liverpool Airport is promoting itself on TV Radio and posters which is good to hear. Convenience factor is being highlighted with short walk terminal to plane. Posters are at Warrington Central Station.
 
Although I haven't personally seen or heard this Liverpool Airport is promoting itself on TV Radio and posters which is good to hear. Convenience factor is being highlighted with short walk terminal to plane. Posters are at Warrington Central Station.

Upgraded Duty Free was also mentioned.
 

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9 trips in 9 days done 70 miles walked and over 23-00 photos taken with a large number taken at 20mph or above. Heavy rain on 1 day only
5 trips done and 45 miles walked,. Also the RAF has had 4 F35B Lightning follow me yesterday and today....
My plans got altered slightly as one of the minibus companies had to cancel 3 trips and refunded me but will be getting nice discount when I rebook them.
wondering why on my "holidays" I choose to get up 2 hours earlier than when going to work. 6 trips in 6 days soon coming up with 3 more days to sort out

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