Regional Airports in Decline

All over the BBC news this morning is the story about the serious decline in passenger numbers from regional airports. It's being dressed up by calling into question the so called 'hidden charges' that regional airports are introducing. The fact is that there are too many airports in Britain for the size of the country. We get away with it in a time of rampant passenger demand but this is only going to get worse over the next year or so. We can expect more airlines to fail and more services to be cut. It's all about economics.

What's more surprising is that no one has linked what's going on to the proposed sale of some of the BAA's airports. There's a lot more to come on this story in the next few months.

The BAA is Not That Badly Broke

I've been a critic of the BAA and I remain so in some aspects of what they do. However, having read the Competition Commission's report I find myself agreeing with the BAA that it is flawed. Take this one statement. "In Scotland, BAA has until recently been noticeably slow to develop new routes at Glasgow and Edinburgh, whilst at Aberdeen, its investment plans are regarded as unambitious despite relatively high levels of profitability. At Southampton, it has shown a reluctance to respond to its customers’ demands." It's not the BAA's job to develop new routes, that's a job for the airlines. Of course they have a part to play, but it's a small part. For Scotland's size and with all the other factors air travel is well developed and will not be magically bettered by a bit of airport competition.

The Competition Commission's report reads like a thesis and they need a sharp dose of reality. Many of the problems that exist are about capacity, government, planning and CAA regulations; all this is against a background of demand for air travel. While it's easy to talk about these things it's much harder to fix them and splitting up the airports is not a panacea, nor much of a solution. I remain unconvinced that it will help and once again I'm minded to think that none of this may have happened if BAA had not been bought by a Spanish company.