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By: - 19th June 2011 at 09:45 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00
It's mostly applying to medium and long-haul flying and not a European route. Though I will throw exactly the same argument about travel... why should passengers north of London get to the London area and fly from there? it's the same road/rail and shows some kind elitist snobbery that it's beneath you to venture north when the majority of the country is going south.
As for people only wanting to travel to the London area.... exactly how many people are aware of notLondon? Too many British institutions and organisations are only too happy to promote London and ignore the rest of the country
The reasoning behind it is they'll have seen how many passengers from their own catchment area are currently flying via LHR/LGW on high volume/high frequency routes and noted airlines want to increase frequency at LHR/LGW rather than branch out. The stupidity of the current situation was shown up by Air India withdrawing their more profitable BHX routes in favour of keeping slots at LHR. At a time when the powers-that-be are clamping down on aviation, it seems ludicrous that the paper value of a LHR slot is worth more than the acutal profits that the BHX route generated.
Applying surcharges (or cutting regional APD) should lead to fewer passengers connecting on to the LHR/LGW routes... and so ease up capacity concerns as there wouldn't be a pressing need to add frequency continually which in turn means clamouring for extra runways to meet this "demand" from airlines.
The classic example is the CAA study showing 138,000 passengers routing MAN-LHR-HKG from around 5 years ago. Although that equates to only 390 passengers a day, there's also the unknown number of passengers who are currently using airlines like Finnair, Lufthansa and Emirates which would be boosting up numbers to 500+ per day. Granted Cathay's cargo throughput at MAN, can anyone care to suggest why it's in the countries interest to have passengers in this region make a short-trip onto the connecting service when the cargo hauling capability of a 777 or A340 should help minimise losses on the passenger side whilst the route is built up ?
And yes, the APD has lost routes for this country...Air Asia X in the last year declined MAN in favour of CDG.
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By: cloud_9 - 16th June 2011 at 18:22
I found and read this rather interesting article...
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23961350-impose-congestion-charge-on-heathrow-say-uk-regional-airports.do
The problem here is that regional airports like Manchester and Birmingham will always have capacity at their airports simply because London is the Capital of the country and that is where a significant amount of business is done and where a lot of the people who travel want to visit (sorry to all those that live in or near to MAN/BHX, no offense intended!:o).
Don't get me wrong, I am a big advocate of regional airports, but are these regional airports seriously suggesting that we should look at getting people to travel up from the South-East simply to make better use of their airports?
Personally, for someone like myself, that makes no sense whatsoever...why on earth would I want to have to drive or catch a train up North in order to fly to somewhere like Spain...the cost of petrol or train fare to travel to BHX/MAN would far outweigh any possible sum of "congestion charge" that could/would be levied on those people that choose to use LHR/LGW, unless of course it would be subsidised in some sort of way (i.e. MAN/BHX agreeing to pay part of the cost!) to make it cheaper, but they are hardly going to agree to that, are they?