Teesside airport £10m bailout while operator departs

I’m abased there hasn’t been more talk of a uk hyper loop
After all the issues around HS2, I can’t see us getting anywhere with a Hyperloop project for at least 20 years. Tunnelling seems to be on the verge of being affordable to smaller cities and large towns though, so I’m more positive about metro services coming to more places before then. Don’t expect it here though, unless some rich benefactor puts the money up out of nowhere.
 
I think that just shows how badly it was being mismanaged by Peel. There really is no reason for it not to be successful with the right management and infrastructure in place. Numbers were heading in the right direction before the pandemic and appear to have picked up recently with the addition of new routes.

I agree the secrecy is a concern, but I also understand that every bit of news is jumped on and spun immediately for policital point scoring. We must have some of the worst councillors in the country for this. Even the independents have their allegiances. Nobody will acknowledge a good idea by the opposition or a bad one by their allies.
Teesside airport grew under peel for four consecutive years (two of which were double digit growth years) to have record traffic levels prior to the financial crash, when operators pulled out and focussed on the larger hubs.

Peel run other airports successfully. If they could make it work long term I’m sure they would have. Like someone said above houchen couldn’t predict Covid, in the same way that Peel couldn’t predict the financial crisis either. However it’s been on public ownership since 2017 now and even stripping Covid out of the equation the recovery has been very slow.

Even Peel’s record of 917k passengers is 100k off what newcastle achieved during the pandemic, while Teesside mustered just 38k passengers. When you look at the money that’s been spent on it over the years it’s going to take a hell of a lot more to get it anywhere near those numbers. Even pre-Covid it’s at 10%ish of the pre-financial crash traffic, so they need traffic to go up 10x to beat the Peel numbers leading up to 2007, that growth seems difficult to achieve in the current environment. It went up 12k passengers in 2018 and another 8k passengers in 2019 so not sure I’d describe that as heading in the right direction

The difference with peel and houchen is peel have shareholders expecting to make a profit whereas houchen can chuck public cash at operators without scrutiny. Once the operators pulled out traffic disappeared but even when we had operators it wasn’t exactly great, I’d always check Teesside but either flight times crap, more expensive or both. Sometimes I look at flights from teesside and yes you can go all over the place now but it’s often really long journey times as it’s via connecting flights and direct is much more expensive

New routes make great headline news / PR points but even pre pandemic flights were often cancelled because too few on them. I’d need to see a good period of success without that happening before banking on them for a flight. I wonder how much of the cash thrown at the airport has been spent on subsidising routes / operators, but we aren’t getting to see this due to the lack of transparency.

Remains to be seen how many people are going to fly on these routes, and going to need meteoric rise of bums in seats and not really seeing where that’s going to come from unless the whole of Teesside goes on holiday several weeks a year. As most people in Yorkshire will go to LBA and most north easterners will go to NCL, and it’s always going to be at risk of an event like Covid / financial crash where operators retreat from smaller airports and focus on the bigger ones due to economies of scale
 
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I think you have to factor in the state of the economy in at the time when looking at growth/decline rather than just judge ownership performance
 
I've got to say he's shown himself up there, putting a trigger warning on the flight reveal video.
 
Nationalisation doesn't work.
Based on what evidence? I'd point to TfL as a good example of a state owned, not for profit organisation that does work.

I don't think basic services should be ran on a basis where shareholders profits are the primary driver.

Utilities, transport and health should not be ran on this basis. Time has proved the ideology of the Thatcher government doesn't actually work in practice ie a competitive market that delivers cheap prices to the customer.

Very much like her "trickle down ecomonics" didn't work either.
 
Used it last week.
Fantastic.
Complete opposite of the shyte hole it was before
Breeze through security, decent sitting areas, good choice of drinks and a short stroll to the plane from the building.
Miles better than Newcastle or Leeds than can both become chaotic.

I hope the public use it and it can turn a profit.

Tried to and they pulled the rug from under us. 8 to 10 of us booked to go to Bristol for the weekend the Boro play there in February. Paid various fares betwee £128 and £169 return as the prices were shooting up everytime one of us booked. But we wanted to back the airport. We booked as soon as the fixtures were announced in June/July. Just over a week ago they cancelled our flights with no excuse given. Next day Logan Air and fat Ben were gloating about new route to Southampton but no mention of the Bristol flight. About two days later the Gazette reported that the route had been dropped. Logan Air siad it was only intended to go to October anyway. So why did they take our bookings for February. We eventually booked from Newcastle for £57 return a big saving even though we have to add a return train journey. So think twice about supporting your local airport unless you get reassurances that the flight will go or use someone like KLM. Loganair and Eastern have a history of dropping flights not just here but elsewhere.
 
I cant see how the airport can ever make a profit

But that doesnt mean it should close and it also doesnt mean public money shouldnt be used to keep it running

nationalisation clearly does work - its probably the only way the airport is going to continue existing and as we are about to see, may well be the future of the energy market too
 
I cant see how the airport can ever make a profit

But that doesnt mean it should close and it also doesnt mean public money shouldnt be used to keep it running

nationalisation clearly does work - its probably the only way the airport is going to continue existing and as we are about to see, may well be the future of the energy market too
I think we just need to accept that it will continue to lose money and that the taxpayer will foot the bill. A 7 fold increase in footfall in the next 4-5 years seems like pie in the sky (or not) though.
 
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