I don’t think it’s all about cost to Jet2 but there are several things they do very well. Branding is one of those things and if they are allowed to stick adverts everywhere in the airport it would go some way to helping the cause, but that’s of course assuming it’s even on their radar because as you say there are large bases north west and south that serve the attractive Sheffield market, not a lot to the east. It’s a duration of costs but for what benefit? Even Doncaster Council wouldn’t have the funds to underwrite to such an extent that it becomes risk free.
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Doncaster Sheffield Airport to reopen?
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No one is going to move wholesale from LBA to DSA as that just loses a significant number of your catchment population. Jet2 also flies from EMA as well and that’s the closest airport to Doncaster as it is.
BoroAndy
Member
True, but getting to LBA by the poor road connections is getting slower and slower as traffic organically grows. If they don't sort out at least a dual carriageway to the airport, or the new tram going there, it will become less and less attractive; while of course, DSA has great road connection.
As I said previously, airlines don't care how pleasant your journey to an airport is, just that you're prepared to make it. An increasing number of passengers using LBA is proof that they are.
DSA isn't that well connected from the north in reality to make a difference. It didn't last time it was open..
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
The roads are fine to LBA, especially from the north and east of the airport. The urban roads to the south of the airport are slower but that's because they're urban roads. And they're urban roads because lots of people live there. People who are prospective customers...
It might be a lovely road to a field in the middle of nowhere, but DSA remains a field in the middle of nowhere. Travel due east from DSA and the first major settlement you come to is Groningen.
True about airlines, they couldn’t care how you arrived just that enough people are.
Coming from the M62 southbound the quickest route to DSA is to turn off M18 onto M180 and then down through Hatfield Woodhouse and on to the airport. Any online route provider would send you this way too, which is a shame because the Great Yorkshire Way was supposed to cut journey times. I suppose it’s probably chopped 5-10 minutes off the journey from Sheffield which is what matters, but it didn’t have any impact on the airlines that served it when it was still open.
Killingworth
Established Member
Although to be fair you'd have to pass over the major settlements of Scunthorpe, Hull and Grimsby to get to Groningen.
Doesn't change the issue, DSA hasn't a heavily populated hinterland.
I drove from Sheffield to Hathersage last night (didn't trust a train). As soon as I passed Owler Bar the glow in the sky to the west from Manchester was apparent. The 2 cities are quite close,
Very true, if Sheffield want true access to global markets then it would be preferable to explore all options of improving surface access to the West. It is around 40 miles as the crow flies, so with the right road and rail infrastructure it could bring Sheffield within 60 minutes of a true international airport.
Doncaster itself is just not large enough, nor does its economy lend itself well to, the support of a regional airport. For it to be a success the 1.4 million people in South Yorkshire need to fully embrace it as their only airport and not just a choice of airport from which to travel. I believe propensity to fly is a little over one trip per person per year, so that would equate to just over 1.4 million people using air travel with ultimate origins of final destinations within South Yorkshire. I think it’s less in the Humber region. It’s therefore understandable why LBA with its 2.5 million people and East Midlands also with around 2.5 million people each on their doorstep are more attractive to airlines when considering starting up routes or bases.
As for freight, DSA isn’t actually so well located. EMA claims to have access to 91% of the English population within 4 hours by road. It’s on the M1 and has direct access to the West Midlands and North West by Dual carriageway going directly from the airport. Basically perfect for time sensitive distribution of freight arriving by air.
Still nothing concrete even after the SYMCA meeting today where a further £3m has been granted to the project to complete legal and commercial negotiations with the preferred operator. We aren’t there yet.
AlastairFraser
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This is why I think it will reopen, but not as a major passenger aviation airport. It seems ideally placed for aircraft manufacturers with the long runway and proximity to the motorway network.
The issue is - who needs one? BAE, not really, neither does Airbus. Too big for a turboprop manufacturer.
Maybe a new startup manufacturer will choose it - I wonder if Wright Electric have any plans for a European manufacturing base, given their association with EasyJet.
BAE had Brough and that’s mostly housing now with a small enclave still existing on what is now a larger business park after lots of the buildings were sold off. Interestingly BAe had a training facility at DSA in the early days, but they then had a huge facility built for them at Humberside which they duly moved into;
BAE Systems opens training academy at Humberside Airport
BAE Systems has opened the RJ Mitchell Aircraft Maintenance Academy at Humberside Airport in North Lincolnshire, England.
www.airport-technology.com
Hybrid Air Vehicles are often mentioned in press releases by SYMCA/CDC, yet they are planning on building a facility at another site north or Doncaster. In fact all of the businesses that are named in these press releases already are based in South Yorkshire so wouldn’t be located at the airport. So I fail to see why they mention it!? Air transport? Well they’re already here so that obviously didn’t factor into their decision making before. Just noise!
They mention the impact on the wider economy but so far the only business the media have found that have been impacted by the closure of the airport is the small Crown Hotel in Bawtry. So are they spending £hundreds of millions so that a small hotel can get some steady income back?
Just bonkers.
Advanced manufacturing is a misnomer, there is a train of thought that this form of manufacturing will atrophy after the decision to leave the EU (lots of major companies employ a JIT principle), but regardless of some success in attracting this type of business into South Yorkshire, a lot of it is already here so what else will they attract that would want to be based at the airport - itself relatively remote from the skills base in Sheffield!
The more that gets said by the local leaders about this project, the more gaping holes appear in their proposal.
As an aside, if the promises of thousands of jobs and large passenger numbers sound familiar, may I cast your minds back to 2003 when the public enquiry found in favour of reopening;
Have they learned nothing?
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AlastairFraser
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Could they be tempted to move to a hangar here?
Hybrid Air Vehicles?
Well they could, but I’m not sure how that would work with conventional aircraft. Airships/balloons don’t tend to mix well with passenger jets.
They could of course just use the DSA site which technically keeps aviation on the site, but that’s not attractive is it.
thejuggler
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I noticed the Mayor was very keen on promoting the 'Gateway' as well as the airport. He probably knows in a few years it will be a business park.
They’re claiming that the airport is needed to ‘unleash the economic growth from Gateway East’. I don’t know why the airport is needed to get Gateway East going? It didn’t before and so far the one unit that has been built is a landslide building. I wish they’d give up with this economic stuff, the economy never relied on an airport nor will it ever, and you can’t build an airport on the assumption that the economy will pick up to support it, because you’ll be waiting years for it to become viable whilst pumping millions into it to keep it running. Just silly really but nobody is questioning it, why?
Killingworth
Established Member
Perish the thought, but what would £3m+ buy to improve still active Humberside Airport? At today's prices it wouldn't be a lot but it probably wouldn't be wasted.
AlastairFraser
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Well, if they initially preserve the site and later relocate to a portion of it when the business grows and the climate for DSA's reopening changes, then it could work.
Well I expect the majority share of Humberside Airport could be purchased for £10million, with businesses already on site it’s got ready made revenue streams. A bit of investment maybe another £10 million (max!) on terminal improvements and stand capacity and I think that’s about all you’d need for the airport to grow into a fully multi faceted business of offshore support helicopters, onsite training, airline facilities, Search and Rescue, GA, maintenance, Scheduled flights and then add some leisure destinations to keep people interested (and the car parks full) and you’d have a successful regional airport that does serve a purpose and could make a small profit. It’s oven ready and could quite easily be the first choice of some 2 million people in Humber, Lincolnshire and Doncaster area of South Yorkshire. It was cut down in its prime when DSA opened I think is fair to say. It was one of the fastest growing U.K. airports up until that point and MAG really could have done great things there, sadly wasn’t to be because Doncaster got greedy. They’re doing it again.
Why greedy you might ask? Well their business plan is based on stealing airlines from other airports to ‘reclaim market share’ which basically means they are aware that unless airlines pull out if other airports, it’s not going to work.
Possibly, but they aren’t keen on that. They want it open now. It’s a sorry state of affairs as they appear to be driven by public feeling on it and not on any solid business case. What makes them think they’ll be able to achieve what Peel couldn’t?
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AlastairFraser
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I meant that they will give Hybrid Air Vehicles an initial lease for part of the site to help fund licensed operations, perhaps.
I think it’s set in stone that they will be on a purpose built site elsewhere, but what you’re saying does make sense. I’m not 100% convinced they’ll actually get off the ground (pardon the pun) though. They have an order for 10 from Air Nostrum but I do wonder.
BoroAndy
Member
Regarding catchment area, it is also the most accessible, time wise, for east yorkshire and coastal regions of North Yorkshire.
True, though they aren’t large markets in and of themselves it all adds up.
I think a big problem for all regional airports is gaining customer confidence. When Humberside opened its runway extension in 1992 there was an immediate and sustained growth in IT Charters to a number of destinations in the Med and beyond. For over ten years it was amongst the fastest growing airports in the U.K. for passenger numbers. It was therefore able, because of its closeness to otherwise quite remote towns and cities, to capture a loyal market. That market was smashed to pieces when DSA opened because suddenly they had a choice of two, but both of them were inherently trying to serve the same sparsely populated markets, and because DSA is closer to the otherwise fairly attractive South Yorkshire market it won out. But it needed to attract passengers from West Yorkshire and the East Midlands to gain the confidence of airlines and it failed to do this. Humberside on the other hand was profitable with a fraction of the number of passengers that DSA would have needed to break even, so it stands to reason that commercially Humberside would have been the better investment.
Local pride should not come into the equation. Thats what got us to this point and what appears to be powering the SY authorities to reopen DSA at apparently any cost without due scrutiny.
IF DSA could become the principle airport for Yorkshire and take business from LBA and EMA to the extent that it is the only viable departure point for everyone then it would have my 100% committed support. But the evidence I’ve seen so far says this isn’t possible, and I’ve not seen anything of these new plans to suggest anything has changed. So because there is no evidence, I don’t believe what they’re proposing is viable or attainable and will likely see lots wasted on a project where other schemes in the area that may be more justifiable will go without.
If South Yorkshire wants links to an airport, then improve the links to Manchester and don’t pretend that an airport serving only outbound holiday makers is a vital piece of regional infrastructure upon which the economic vitality of said region relies! Because it’s nonsense.
I assume if you go to the airlines and say “we want to open an airport, are you interested in using it?” they will all profess to be very interested as long as you don’t ask them to sign or Pay anything, as they won’t lose money when it goes pop but they will hope to leverage it to get a better deal from their current base?
You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s quite easy to get expressions of interest, but if you look carefully at what happened previously, the airlines that ‘signed up’ in 2003/4 actually ended up at competitor airports. The barriers to entry are so high that it would take years and years of consistent hard work to develop relationships and gain the confidence of the airlines to invest.
Talk is that the operator they are in negotiations with is a European airport operator. No suggestion get as to whether this operator currently owns or runs any U.K. airports. If they don’t they may find that like the Canadians that briefly owned DSA in 2011-13, the U.K. is a hyper competitive environment where catchment areas significantly overlap and so airlines are extremely careful when deciding where to place their valuable resources to maximise market exposure and revenue.
You would like to think a European airport operator would have more of a handle on the UK scene then a Canadian one.
Not really, the Canadians already had European ops too as part of their international portfolio. They lost £50million on the Peel Airports venture. It differs greatly from country to country and the U.K. is densely populated also served by too many airports, this isn’t necessarily the case in Europe where a more strategic approach to airport development has been implemented over the decades after WW2.
In the case of the U.K. it was a policy failure that resulted in an every town for itself mentality which has caused the situation we are in now. Basically any airport not deemed of national importance (those later incorporated into BAA) were left to fend for themselves. Some got it right (MAN, EMA) others just decided to push ahead with existing infrastructure left over from WW2 that for various reasons often didn’t lend themselves well to commercial aviation.
A whole Yorkshire approach would have seen an airport near Ferrybridge or Thorne Moor. But that wasn’t implemented. As a Hull local did you know that Brough should have had an extension of its runway to 7000ft in the late 60’s, but this was shelved when someone had the bright ideal to put a chimney on the approach which stopped CAT over night? There are examples like this all over the country where opportunities were missed, I’m afraid for DSA it’s just too late and they will need too much money investing into it for decades before they see any return on it. They need to just stop now.
You wouldn’t pass over Hull and neither Scunthorpe or Grimsby are ‘major’ in the sense of passenger numbers for airlines.
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There's nothing special about DSA's runway, it's not even in the top ten longest in the UK now ( and EMA's is exactly the same length) and flying out an empty airframe doesn't need a long runway in any event.
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AlastairFraser
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It isn't particularly specially long, of course, but most of the other options are occupied (EMA by some passenger/loads of goods traffic, Heathrow is extremely busy with all sorts) or currently closed (e.g. Manston).
It's also in a region with some of the lowest median wages, compared to most other English regions barring the North East (link here: Median weekly wage by region of residence), which is of course useful for any startup with limited initial funding.
Maybe so, but low wages means less people who can afford or need to fly. This is the inherent stupidity of the argument that an airport is needed for economic regeneration. Airports do not boost the economy in the way they’re claiming! If you cut South Yorkshire adrift and plonked it in the middle of the North Sea then of course you’d have demand for a large airport. But South Yorkshire is landlocked and has fairly decent motorway links which takes people out of the region to fly.
I would be happy to bet that turning the land over to redevelop as an employment zone would have much greater benefits to the economy and reduce ‘worklessness’. No company is going to invest in South Yorkshire if it has an airport that has flights to Alicante a couple of times a week. I just can’t see why nobody is challenging this!
AlastairFraser
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Yes, I've accepted that it will likely not open for passenger aviation as it is now, I'm talking about lower average wages for any startup looking to employ or train staff/apprentices in the aviation industry.
The runway is just a standard length commercial runway now. I’ve no idea where the idea that there’s something special about the runway at DSA comes from. There really isn’t.
As Pug says lower median wages just means less people who can afford to fly.
There aren’t going to be ‘lower than average wages’ for apprentices or anyone else. If you want talented people as aerospace engineers (and the Doncaster area currently has none as there’s no industry based there) then you aren’t going to attract them to move there by offering lower wages. Apprenticeship wages are set by the government so there’s no saving there either.
This is one of the more stretching justifications in honesty.
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