CAA Provisional Statistics Update

[alphagolf]

There seems to be some missing figures though - Sal, hurghada , cancun , Marrakesh and Orlando all report zero figures but I’m pretty sure they operated during March. Also canary island services are massively down when I’m not aware of a drastic reduction in services this year.

Nonetheless other figures are showing excellent increases no doubt due to the bad weather of March 2018? Amsterdam nearly handled 40k in March 2019 !

CAA Statistics have been updated as of 28th May 2019 to reflect the missing Charter figures, I have been through the whole spreadsheet and my figures add up to 622,792, slightly higher than CAA's own Terminal Pax figures.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

CAA Statistics have been updated as of 28th May 2019 to reflect the missing Charter figures, I have been through the whole spreadsheet and my figures add up to 622,792, slightly higher than CAA's own Terminal Pax figures.

The CAA stats for any airport or route are rarely one hundred per cent accurate.

Table 12.2 Domestic Pax Route Analysis and Table 12.3 Domestic Route Analysis By Each Reporting Airport are examples.

12.2 lists all domestic route passengers each month under the airport coming first in the alphabetic list. 12.3 lists all domestic route passengers under the two airports at either end of the route. Why they bother with two tables in this way I can never fathom, especially since they have axed other tables that showed information not available elsewhere such as diversions.

Anyway, looking at 12.3 will show that many (most?) routes show different passenger totals depending on which airport they are listed under.

For example, the route between BRS and EDI in March shows 37,234 passengers under the BRS list and 37,557 under the EDI list.The route between BRS and GLA is similarly at odds with BRS showing 28,376 for March and GLA 28,469. It's been like this for ages, perhaps always, and all UK domestic routes are involved.

I regard CAA stats as a broad guide to a route's and airport's performance rather than expecting the figures to be accurate to the nth degree. It should not be like that but it is. There are people being paid for producing conflicting stats.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

CAA stats published today for many UK airports. BRS is not among them. March's appearance in the first group of airports seems to have been an isolated occurrence.

 

[Marko1]

I’m not surprised . The airports own data is permanently stuck on December 2018.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

I’m not surprised . The airports own data is permanently stuck on December 2018.

That would be one way of keeping the passengers figures permanently below 10 mppa.

 

[Marko1]

Wouldn’t it. Bet that’s what they are doing

 

[alphagolf]

Does someone want to look at the CAA stats for BRS for April as I think there is something drastically wrong with the figures, it’s suggesting over 1million pax for the month. Some of routes pax are double that of last year..............

 

[Jerry]

Does someone want to look at the CAA stats for BRS for April as I think there is something drastically wrong with the figures, it’s suggesting over 1million pax for the month. Some of routes pax are double that of last year..............

An extra 300,000 passengers with 44% growth??

 

[Scottie Dog]

I suggest that you drop an email to the address on the CAA site. They do reply where necessary as I had to highlight the fact the they had initially reloaded March Excel stats in the April file.

 

[alphagolf]

I suggest that you drop an email to the address on the CAA site. They do reply where necessary as I had to highlight the fact the they had initially reloaded March Excel stats in the April file.

I have emailed the CAA and advised that Tables 09, 12.2 are especially flawed due to noted increases on routes, to the extent that the figures advised for SFB, CUN & MBJ are physically impossible with the size of aircraft and number of rotations.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

We've discussed many times in the past how farcical the CAA stats can be and not just with BRS. There have been some well-documented howlers across the board some months in past years, but this has got to be the most spectacular yet.

I've had a quick look through them (I've been away and out of 'Internet contact' for a week until today) and many of the Spanish, German and Italian routes are clearly out with the fairies as well as those highlighted by alphagolf.

I've just sent this message to the airport. I await with interest any reply that I might receive.

I've just been reading the Civil Aviation Authority airport passenger statistics for April this year and note that Bristol Airport handled 44% more passengers (300,000 more) than in April 2018.

April 2019's total is shown as 1,013,191, more than Birmingham Airport handled in April. You seem to have kept this milestone very quiet. Surely it must be a cause for celebration although if you continue to increase passenger throughput by 300,000 for the remainder of the summer you will have reached your ten million per annum planning cap by August.

Or has the CAA once again come up with a gigantic howler with its stats? Don't they receive their passenger stats from the airports in the first place though?

 

[TheLocalYokel]

CAA stats April 2019

Re my last post #671, I had a reply from Bristol Airport today in which they said they sent the April passenger figures to the CAA and they numbered 716,405. They are 'not sure' how the error occurred but are contacting the CAA to change the stats and update them with the correct information.

716,405 would mean a rise of just 1.9% on April 2018. It might be that these are the BRS figures that discount under 2s etc in which case the 'CAA figures' (which do include such passengers) would be likely to be around 722,000. That would be a rise of around 2.5% on April 2018.

Given that April 2019 included Easter the figures might be thought to be disappointing. However, in April 2018 the now axed flybmi routes accounted for over 18,000 passengers.

 

[Marko1]

There was also extra charter flights with Thomas cook basing a secon a321 during April so that is a little poor if that result is true

 

[Red Flyer]

If those are BRS figures then the increase would be slightly north of 3.3% or 22953 pax and if as you say BMR are taken out of the equation the actual pax increase would be almost 40k which then makes it quite a good month after all.

 

[TheLocalYokel]

I've never been a professional statistician nor even been employed in a job where stats were an important part of the work, but it beggars believe why such a relatively simple task as recording the number of passengers using airports and routes seems to throw up so much difficulty.

As I mentioned recently, even two airports cannot agree the monthly figures on a route between them.

Every month CAA table 12.3 Domestic Air Passengers Route Analysis By Each Reporting Airport consistently throws up anomalies. It's the table where both airports report the monthly passenger figures on the route between them.

I looked at various routes at random for April this year, and with the first six the reported passenger figures were at odds with each other. If I had continued through the entire list of domestic routes most, perhaps all, would have failed to agree on the numbers. Doesn't anyone at the CAA question the disparities?

Would the head people at the CAA be so sanguine if pilots were so cavalier with their calculations?

Belfast City-Cardiff
BHD showed 6353, CWL showed 5705

Bristol-Newcastle
NCL showed 16639, BRS showed 16507

Bristol-Edinburgh
BRS showed 32839, EDI showed 32316

Birmingham-Glasgow
GLA showed 19544, BHX showed 19374

Guernsey-Exeter
EXT showed 2847, GCI showed 2724

Liverpool-Isle of Man
LPL showed 19997, IOM showed 19871

 

[alphagolf]

CAA stats April 2019

Re my last post #671, I had a reply from Bristol Airport today in which they said they sent the April passenger figures to the CAA and they numbered 716,405. They are 'not sure' how the error occurred but are contacting the CAA to change the stats and update them with the correct information.

716,405 would mean a rise of just 1.9% on April 2018. It might be that these are the BRS figures that discount under 2s etc in which case the 'CAA figures' (which do include such passengers) would be likely to be around 722,000. That would be a rise of around 2.5% on April 2018.

Given that April 2019 included Easter the figures might be thought to be disappointing. However, in April 2018 the now axed flybmi routes accounted for over 18,000 passengers.

Had an email response from the CAA today which I will let you all read yourselves, some of it is laughable:-

Thank you for your email. This has been identified as a problem and is currently being investigated.

Data does go through a lot of system generated checks as well as a manual review and at that stage figures matched that submitted.
We will of course revise tables on the web site once the issue is resolved.

Debbie McLean
Flight Data Team
Business Intelligence
Civil Aviation Authority

 

[TheLocalYokel]

Had an email response from the CAA today which I will let you all read yourselves, some of it is laughable:-

Thank you for your email. This has been identified as a problem and is currently being investigated.

Data does go through a lot of system generated checks as well as a manual review and at that stage figures matched that submitted.
We will of course revise tables on the web site once the issue is resolved.

Debbie McLean
Flight Data Team
Business Intelligence
Civil Aviation Authority

It is laughable but it's also a disgrace. People are being paid to produce these stats yet no-one seems able to spot an error of gargantuan proportions.

I don't think that Bristol Airport had spotted the farcical figures published by the CAA either because I was thanked for drawing it to their attention.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, CAA table 12.3 Domestic Air Passengers Route Analysis By Each Reporting Airport is consistently at odds with itself with the airports at either end of a route rarely ageeing on the number of passengers carried each month. This has been the case for years.

What is the point of publishing clearly incorrect data? It must cost an inordinate amount of money. If stats are wrong they are best left unpublished.

 

[Seasider]

I can see the CAA not publishing stats in the near future.

 

[User1007]

Wrong or misleading statistics should not be published - a 33% increase in traffic at Bristol for example. It really can't be difficult for the CAA to publish the numbers the airport gives them. But whilst they really should give instructions to airports to collect data in a consistent way, are we really that bothered about small discrepancies that we'd rather have nothing instead?

 

[TheLocalYokel]

Wrong or misleading statistics should not be published - a 33% increase in traffic at Bristol for example. It really can't be difficult for the CAA to publish the numbers the airport gives them. But whilst they really should give instructions to airports to collect data in a consistent way, are we really that bothered about small discrepancies that we'd rather have nothing instead?

I've been following the CAA stats for many years and in recent years there is no doubt that they have become very sloppy. Whilst in itself it doesn't matter a great deal that (for example) on the Bristol-Edinburgh route in April BRS showed 32,839 passengers and EDI 32,316, the cumulative effect over time can become distorting, and anyway why should there be any difference?

Last September the CAA stats for BRS were obviously wrong in many details, and for a number of years Verona was either missed out or only shown sporadically whereas it had operated continually. These are just a couple of examples re BRS - I could bore people with many, many more, and it's not just BRS that's been affected.

BRS which hasn't pubished its own stats since the end of last year - it used to publish them monthly - complicated things still further in that it did not include certain types of traveller (under 2s for example) that the CAA does include. The result was that each month the BRS passenger figures were typically 7,000-11,000 lower than the CAA's and around 100,000 lower each year. I don't know why BRS did this because the CAA receives its own figures from BRS.

For a long time I've regarded the CAA passenger figures as a broad outline and I never accept them as being one hundred per cent accurate, although there is no reason whatsoever, apart from human ineptitude, why they should not be.

If we amateurs can spot glaring errors what are the relevant CAA staff doing?