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London Heathrow lies 87 miles southeast, representing about 10 minutes’ flying time. Luton airport is 71 miles away in a lot the similar route. Manchester airport stands 66 miles northwest, whereas East Midlands is barely 32 miles northeast.
Where am I? Birmingham airport, after all. And in the firm of the chief government of the West Midlands hub, Nick Barton. With opponents in such shut proximity, doesn’t he really feel a bit squeezed?
“If you didn’t offer the network coverage and the pricing, then yes – but that isn’t the case,” he says. “We have more people in our catchment area than live in Canada. It’s a big old number of people.
“With the variety of airlines we’ve got, and they’re all competing strongly, they’re stimulating and penetrating that catchment.”
We are talking on the day that easyJet launched its new base at Birmingham airport, the place three Airbus jets will probably be situated. It is easyJet’s first new base in the UK for 12 years (throughout which period Britain’s largest finances airline has closed bases at East Midlands, Newcastle, Stansted and Southend).
The phrase “ferocious competition” appears designed for the growth. Among the 16 new routes easyJet has introduced, 5 serve key resort airports in Spain: Alicante, Barcelona, Fuerteventura, Malaga and Tenerife. Jet2 and Ryanair already fly to all of them.
Tui and the Spanish finances airline, Vueling, additionally compete, and to full the set Wizz Air affords a handful of hyperlinks. Is this, I ponder, going to be the best airport in the UK for European flights – much more so than Manchester?
“I’d hope so, because the winner in that circumstance is the customer,” says the Birmingham CEO. “It always is.”
“We can only expect to see [the airlines] challenging each other and getting better. That’s what they’ve done down the recent history of aviation. They’ve always been successful, and we’ve got all of them here.
“So we are very, very comfortable in seeing that competitive tension between the airlines.”
Can competitors go too far, although? I confessed to Barton that my earlier two reporting assignments to Birmingham airport had been for the collapse of Monarch in 2017 and the failure of Flybe in 2020.
“It was the evolution of our industry, wasn’t it? Where the older operators with older business models are out-competed by the newer ones. And all of the traffic that we used to have with those airlines – which was nearly 40 per cent of our total – has been completely replaced.
“So it just shows you the industry can reinvent itself with new investment, new aeroplanes, new business models – and our customers have benefited from that.”
From the viewpoint of somebody dwelling or working in central London (I do each), Birmingham has been propelled into the place of a viable different to the capital’s airports.
Trains from London Euston take simply 65 minutes to a devoted station (making it nearer, in time phrases from central London, than Southampton airport and solely 20 minutes additional than Stansted). From subsequent week, new safety scanners will speed up the journey by way of the airport.
I at the moment use Birmingham airport when the value is true – most not too long ago an inexpensive Ryanair deal to Corfu – or once I want to attain certainly one of the few destinations inaccessible from a London airport. In May I’ll avail of the new Ryanair hyperlink to Beauvais (loosely referred to as “Paris”) in northern France.
For long-haul flights, Birmingham makes proposition when going east: Emirates operates an enormous Airbus A380 and a Boeing 777 from BHX to Dubai, whereas Air India flies to Amritsar.
Yet the every day hyperlink to New York disappeared years in the past. Barton needs to restore common transatlantic flying.
“The biggest challenge at the moment is aircraft availability,” he says. “The airlines have got the appetite. It’s just a question of getting the right aeroplanes. They start coming online in ’25.”
British Airways received’t be coming again to Birmingham any time quickly, I concern, and United could choose its presence at Heathrow and Manchester to be enough with out diluting visitors with a Midlands connection. But as congestion will increase in southeast England, Birmingham could quickly add some priceless transatlantic capability.
“I spent a week in the United States and Canada just before Christmas,” the Birmingham boss says. While he “wouldn’t want to overpromise at this stage”, he expects to resume providers to North America in two or three years. And if the HS2 rail line from London ever will get constructed, with a station at Birmingham airport, the Midlands may even grow to be a quick monitor to Manhattan.
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