Quote Originally Posted by llan bluebird View Post
This is where any linked-up thinking crumbles.

Scale baby, Scale. The fixed costs are amortised over fewer routes so the landing fee has to rise to cover the fixed costs. To reduce the landing fee's you need more flights, to get more flight you need to offer discounted rates to the airlines, at a loss to start. If you did decide to do that the airlines need to fill their planes. Geographically it knackered. Nothing south, few people live to the east of you, so its 20 miles north and west. West you have to travel through a bottleneck of biblical proportions and the alternative is non-existent public transport, which is an expensive train to Cardiff and a bus to the airport (same as most UK airports)

I remember Micheal O'Leary of Ryanair saying that CWL relied on the UK subsidy for keeping that very long runway in good condition as its the first transatlantic emergency landing strip

Its artificially been kept alive, it needed to move to severn junction region 20 years ago when that was first mooted

The runway at 2392 metres is relatively short albeit still longer than Bristol’s.
I’d take anything O’Leary says with a pinch of salt , there is no subsidy to maintain the runway.

Agree with what you say about location which is Cardiff’s biggest weakness together with a catchment area which is economically in decline resulting in a local population having less propensity to fly.
Until that changes it will struggle to match the halcyon days of 2002-2004 where pax numbers were over 2m.

Bristol suffers the same poor infrastructure problems as Cardiff , but its well placed to serve a larger and wealthier catchment area , including annoyingly large parts of SE Wales.

The one possible bright spot for Cardiff is that Bristol is now pretty much full , this summer there will be 36 based aircraft between the based airlines there and they simply do not have the stand capacity for any further expansion.
If air travel continues to bounce back strongly as it has since the pandemic then airlines may start to look at Cardiff for potential overspill traffic.