Has Ireland too many airports?

Plowman

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Delancey

It seems that most people in this country forget we have a population well under 5 million but still demand the aviation infrastructure for a population 10 times that.
I think airports are seen as somehow a sign that a place is ' happening ' and is on the ' up '.
As we all know the reality is brutally different.......

Yes , far too many airports.

cml387

Kerry,Shannon,Galway,Knock,Sligo.

All on the west coast serving a miniscule population.

Keep Shannon,it has a strategic role in terms of safety and its long runway
and close the rest.

angelfire9

I would be of the opinion that Shannon Airport would operate a hell of a lot better if it wasn't being run by the DUBLIN Airport Authority! :mad:

Secondly, seeing as it looks like Galway is going then Shannon has a nice catchment area in Clare/Limerick/Galway that will hopefully start using Shannon

The drop in passenger numbers in Shannon is partly due to Ryanair shifting flights to Cork

Ryanair has confirmed that it is to reduce it’s Shannon base from 6 aircraft to 4 aircraft in protest at the introduction of the government’s €10 departure tax, which is due to come in to effect on April 1.

From March 30, the following will come into effect:

* The airline will reduce its Shannon based aircraft numbers from 6 to 4 in for Summer of this year.

*Reduce its route network at Shannon from 30 to 25.

* Cut its weekly Shannon flights from 136 to 116 flights.

* Reduce its Shannon traffic from 1.9m to 1.2m

* Reduce its Shannon jobs from over 300 to less than 200.

Of course now that the €10 tax is gone there is no sign of the flights returning.. typical O'Leary

SHANNON Airport Authority "should 100% receive" the €3.5 million Ryanair paid to the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) for breach of the five-year contract with Shannon Airport on passenger charges.

That’s according to tourism expert Prof Jim Deegan of the University of Limerick’s Department of Economics, who said yesterday the €3.5m should be transferred to Shannon to be used for the promotion of the airport.

Prof Deegan said: "Shannon made the deal with Ryanair and Ryanair coming into Shannon stopped other airlines coming into the airport. Shannon should 100% receive that money."

Prof Deegan was echoing calls made by Fine Gael TD, Joe Carey, who said that the money should be used exclusively by Shannon.

The out-of-court settlement arose from a legal action taken by the DAA against Ryanair over breaching the contract.

Mr Carey has written to the DAA seeking commitments that the money be devoted exclusively to Shannon.

Ryanair also agreed to pay the airport authority’s legal costs, believed to be several hundred thousand euro.

The court case related to a five-year discount deal on passenger charges between Ryanair and Shannon that was agreed in November 2004. The deal ran from May 2005 until April 2010.

It involved Ryanair being offered a substantial discount on airport charges — it paid between €1 and €2 per person — in return for carrying an agreed number of passengers.

Shannon’s standard charge at the time was €4 per departing passenger.

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Wednesday, February 09, 2011


Read more: http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/kfeyeygbauey/rss2/#ixzz1SJTnYg9O

Naturally Joe Carey has been conspicuously silent on this since FG came into office

From the DAA website:

Rather than paying the normal passenger charges at Shannon, Ryanair wants instead to be paid €4.70 by Shannon Airport for every passenger it brings to the airport. In addition to seeking payment for passengers, Ryanair says it will pay no landing or aircraft charges at Shannon for what it defines as any new passengers. The airline is also demanding a range of other free services such as free check-in desks, free offices, and free communications.

Ryanair has also insisted that DAA pay back €3.7 million that Ryanair paid DAA in January. This payment was made to settle a High Court case that related to Ryanair’s failure to meet passenger targets at Shannon Airport under a previous deal. Ryanair has insisted that this €3.7 million payment, which could be construed as a form of “hello money,” be made by DAA to the airline before a single new passenger, as Ryanair defines them, is delivered at Shannon.

Having been forced to take legal proceedings over an airline’s failure to meet a previous binding agreement in relation to passenger targets, no airport could be expected to hand back a €3.7 legal million settlement to that same customer in advance of any future deal.

Having obtained clarification from Ryanair in recent days, the DAA’s initial view that the airline’s position in relation to Shannon appeared unsustainable has been borne out. On that basis, Shannon Airport cannot accede to Ryanair’s request for financial support.

Ryanair claims the airline’s current operation at Shannon handles 300,000 passengers per year, and it wants the airport to waive all charges and instead pay the airline for every passenger above that level. However the 300,000 figure quoted by Ryanair is more than 100,000 passengers below the airline’s current indicated traffic level at Shannon for this year.

Shannon Airport’s key focus is on developing sustainable passenger traffic and it has a range of incentive schemes that offer discounts of up to 100% on airport charges for new routes. Despite the significant reduction in traffic last year due to Ryanair’s capacity withdrawals, Shannon Airport’s financial position has improved during the past 12 months, as its airline customers - including Ryanair - are paying a sustainable charge for the services that they use.

Shannon’s focus on sustainable passenger traffic has yielded a number of new routes and expansions in recent months. These include the establishment of new Aer Lingus Regional services to Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburg and Bristol and new Aer Lingus services to Gatwick and Paris-Charles de Gaulle.

Ryanair, despite the ending of its previous agreement, has also expanded its presence at Shannon recently with a new Fuerteventura service from February, as well as the reinstatement of its Nantes, Malaga and Palma-Mallorca services.

The traffic decline at Shannon Airport over the past 12 months is almost entirely due to the withdrawal of Ryanair services, following the end of Ryanair’s previous deal with Shannon, the terms of which Ryanair failed to honour. About 90% of the decline in passenger numbers is due to the significant reduction in Ryanair services.

Ryanair also failed to deliver the tourist numbers that it promised for the region under the previous Shannon agreement. When Ryanair launched the previous agreement, it claimed that 80% of traffic into Shannon would be inbound tourists. However, it transpired that on many of the European routes that it operated, 80% of the traffic was outgoing Irish people travelling abroad and only 20% were inbound tourists.

It should also be noted that Shannon Airport has the longest runway in Ireland (to the best of my knowledge) and its location has meant that it handles a large % of all emergency landings in Irish airspace as well as planes which develop difficulties over the Atlantic

Lapin

Good post OP, but suggesting that Cork city is a "metropolis" might be streching the imagination slightly !

chucken1

Plowman wrote: »

This might be a controversial topic, but what does the future hold for Ireland's other airports? By "other" I mean all except Dublin airport, particularly Cork and Shannon.

Leo Varadkar has already stated that Galway and Sligo airports will have to fund themselves from next year, as the State will only be in a position to support Donegal, Knock, Kerry, and Waterford. However, when you think about it, Ireland has a disproportionate number of airports along the west coast relative to the west's population density - seven altogether (Donegal, Sligo, Knock, Galway, Shannon, Kerry, Cork, and arguably Waterford). Besides Shannon and Cork, these airports are minuscule, have very small passenger numbers, and probably could not survive without public funding. Has Ireland's improved motorway network rendered many of these small airports obsolete?

As for Shannon and Cork, is their relative proximity to each other eating into their potential passenger numbers? While Shannon has adjacent aircraft maintenance facilities and full US CBP, its passenger figures have been either stable or falling for most of the last decade (with the exception of three years when they rose - 2003, 2005, 2006). Cork has seen a consistent rise in passengers over the past decade (except for 2009 and 2010 when they fell). Cork is closer to a metropolis but Shannon has local industries based around the airport. Can they both survive in the long term?

I don't have any answers to the above, but I do think nine airports are a few too many considering the population and size of the island. And no, I'm not from the big shmoke although I admit its airport is the one I've used most often. :P[/QUOTE

Do you actually know how far apart Cork and Shannon are??

chucken1

@ angelh. Which Ryanair flights are going to be taken from Shannon to Cork?

the beerhunter

Plowman wrote: »

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Unless "west" has been redefined to mean "not dublin", both waterford and cork can be struck from that list.

kippy

Shannon is completely under utilised, probably due to a combination of the DAA and the amount of airports on that seaboard.
I dont care how many airports we have to be honest so long as they are not state funded.
The only state funded airports I'd like to see are Dublin and Shannon.
Shannon has been let go in all sense of the word and there would be no harm in taking this away from the DAA's control in order to give it a new lease of live. The road network in the country now almost makes both their airports accessible pretty quickly from the major population centres.

Quaderno

cml387 wrote: »

Keep Shannon,it has a strategic role in terms of safety and its long runway and close the rest.

Kerry Airport made an operating profit of €248,000 in the last accounting period (+2,9%) with 424,599 people travelling (+3%). It currently has no PSO route since Ryanair pulled out of KIR-DUB. So why would you want to close a profitable business? Mind the HHN-KIR connection bringing a particularly impressive number of Germans to Kerry and tourism is basically the only significant source of income for that part of the country...

kippy

Quaderno wrote: »

Kerry Airport made an operating profit of €248,000 in the last accounting period (+2,9%) with 424,599 people travelling (+3%). It currently has no PSO route since Ryanair pulled out of KIR-DUB. So why would you want to close a profitable business? Mind the HHN-KIR connection bringing a particularly impressive number of Germans to Kerry and tourism is basically the only significant source of income for that part of the country...

Once the airport isn't funded by the state I've no issues with leaving it open........
Any airport that is making a profit of a quarter of a million a year probably wont have any issues getting private funding.
It would be far more important for the state assist Shannon in order to provide a large airport on the Western Seaboard.

xflyer

A similar debate has been ongoing on the Galway City forum about the fate of Galway airport. I stole this graphic and it says it all:




Look at all the jet capable airports West and South. Plus the other two for a total of seven. On the East coast we have Dublin, one airport for a large population.

So the short answer is yes. But on the other hand there can never be enough airports for the consumer or indeed pilots and aircraft companies. It's only a problem when they have to be subsidied by the taxpayer and still have minimal traffic like Sligo or indeed Galway which was a bit busier.

280special

Xflyer, If the travel times used for the East coast are anything to go by that map is well out of date !

60 mins from Dundalk, 90 mins from Newry to Dublin airport ? They must be nuts ! From Newry 55 mins, 45 from Dundalk , allow max 10 mins extra for a bad traffic day ! Have done Dundalk to the Airport in 40 without breaking any speed limits and even then had delays at the on-slip !

And when talking about the East Coast dont forget that Belfast Int is roughly about 90 mins from Dublin....and you can get your car parked and valeted for a lot less than the cost of parking it at Dublin ! Shame about all the muppets with their flags, beer bellies and dirty looks at white plated cars this time of year !!

The West and the South does appear to have far too many airports, in all honesty I cant see them surviving. Sad as it is for many people,I would think Galway or Sligo wont last too long.

xflyer

Didn't notice that but you're right. Personally it took me about an hour to drive from Knock airport to Galway recently. The map gets that right though.

As for airports surviving well they can, just not in their present form. Sligo has been getting by on two flights a day for some time. Galway shows signs of adapting. It had big airport notions about itself and antagonised people both in Galway and in the GA community. That's changing now. Somehow I can't see either closing and turning into a racetrack for the local boy racers. They will continue as airfields I would hope.

Plowman

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aviteire

212 Airports/Airstrips in Ireland at present!
County Galway has the most, 17 in total.

These commercial airports wont close down if they loose goverment funding.
In my own experience, (I have witnessed this happen),
Goverment Pulls out,
Airlines Pull out of airport,
Airport has no ATC anymore or fire cover,
General Aviation may or may not continue at said airport,
One day a rich swiss, american, whoever!! Comes along and buys the airport up for alot less than what it was worth a couple years ago when it was a commercial site,
Panic in the streets for a few weeks as locals worry and wonder what this new invester will do, build a housing estate or do a deal with the likes of Michael O'Leary,
A few years later, its back to been a commercial airport.

Since Galway city has access to the new M6 motorway and dublin is easy to drive to now, I can see Galway and Sligo been a waste of time and money for the goverment.
However, I think Knock is VITAL for the wesht.

xflyer

212? Most are privately owned airstrips, few are licensed, very few have tarmac runways, fewer again have any real facilities. Most are little more than mown grass in a field. Even some of the busier fields fit that Weston being the only obvious example to buck that trend.

In terms of airports, there are only nine in the republic and that is too many in terms of the population and demand. But that isn't to say they should be closed down. Just because central government has neither the time no money to subsidise them anymore doesn't mean they should be closed. Closing airports is bad news and despite what nimbys think is often bad for the area they are situated in.

But if regional airports want to stay open they need to justify their existence and they need local help.
Incidentally of the seventeen in Galway, only one is really public, the airport. There's Connemara and the three Aran Island runways. The rest are privately owned and often tiny little strips.
Word of warning: Inishman is now owned by Aer Arann, they require permission 24 hours in advance. If you don't they will report you to the IAA.

aviteire

Wasnt aware about the 24hr PPR for Inishman! Cheers for the Intel. I'll remember that the next time I pop out there in the hughes.

There is a 900 meter private (owned by a very famous person!!) tarmac runway south of clifden with JET A1, mainly small biz jets and helicopters go in there (PPR only), plus I there are those other 2 new strips in cleggan and out on inishbofin. Dont know if there open yet and like you mentioned the other 9 airstrips in the county are grass airfields.

Neworder79

Dont know if there open yet and like you mentioned the other 9 airstrips in the county are grass airfields.

No, runways only accepting sheep for the moment.

Article in Galway paper recently said O'Cuive was seeking funding to build a terminal and operate the €10m Clifden/Inishboffin airstrips.

xflyer

aviteire wrote: »

Wasnt aware about the 24hr PPR for Inishman! Cheers for the Intel. I'll remember that the next time I pop out there in the hughes.
There is a 900 meter private (owned by a very famous person!!) tarmac runway south of clifden with JET A1, mainly small biz jets and helicopters go in there (PPR only)

No more popping out, I'm afraid, they have already reported at least one pilot that I'm aware of. Quite a shock let me tell you.

I wasn't aware of the 900 metre strip near Clifden. So who is the very famous person? I'm aware of the tarmac runways in Rathkeale and Dolly Grove. The one in Clifden is new to me. That's my Euro Lotto win dream idea, a tarmac strip beside my estate and big house. You can drop in, in that egg beater of yours.

Quaderno

I have to withdraw my earlier statement about Kerry Airport. The first six months of this year were not very good:

radiokerry.ie wrote:

Kerry Airport has made a loss of around 600 thousand euro for the first six months of this year. (...) The company predicts a decrease of around 70 thousand passengers using the Farranfore facility this year. (...)

nag

xflyer wrote: »

Word of warning: Inishman is now owned by Aer Arann, they require permission 24 hours in advance. If you don't they will report you to the IAA.

Yikes! I tried ringing them for PPR before but couldn't get through to anyone. Is Inisheer the same?
I heard (from an islander on Inishmore) that a few hundred thousand went missing from the island co-op who were running the airport on Inishmaan, hence why AerArann are running the show there now.

aviteire wrote: »

There is a 900 meter private (owned by a very famous person!!) tarmac runway south of clifden with JET A1, mainly small biz jets and helicopters go in there (PPR only).

Where exactly? I've looked for it on OSI's satellite pictures but can't see anything. Is it new (ie. post 2005)?

xflyer

Just Inishmaan, for now. But check out the AIP, unless it's officially mentioned there. It can't be enforced. But really stay away unless you get permission. Inisheer and Inishmore is OK.

You will get a phone call from a grim sounding IAA man if you don't get permission.

mayotom

Knock is also profitable, and improving all the time, with minimal State funding(which was mainly for the now defunct PSO routes) Passenger numbers are on the increase and will probably overtake SNN this year. Although SNN has a lot more going on with Military and Maintenance flights, shannon and Cork have to be separated from the DAA before the DAA runs them into the ground

munchkin_utd

nag wrote: »

Where exactly? I've looked for it on OSI's satellite pictures but can't see anything. Is it new (ie. post 2005)?

completed october 2008 at a cost of 5 million euro.
http://www.lmkeating.ie/clifden_airstrip.html

surely one of the better monuments to the boom times.

Edit, then again, Irish rail can barely build a one platform railway halt for the same money. A runway on pure bog for 5 million might actualy not be the worst value for money in comparison

Edit Edit : the one platform Oranmore station and small park and ride was projected to cost NINE million euro
http://www.galwayindependent.com/local-news/local-news/call-for-clarity-on-oranmore-railway-station/

kippy

munchkin_utd wrote: »

completed october 2008 at a cost of 5 million euro.
http://www.lmkeating.ie/clifden_airstrip.html

surely one of the better monuments to the boom times.

Edit, then again, Irish rail can barely build a one platform railway halt for the same money. A runway on pure bog for 5 million might actualy not be the worst value for money in comparison

What is the story with the runway on Bofin? I was out there in October and while on a walk realised there was a runway there. I notice the clifden runway was to assist with servicing bofin.

nag

munchkin_utd wrote: »

completed october 2008 at a cost of 5 million euro.
http://www.lmkeating.ie/clifden_airstrip.html

Thanks munchkin_utd but it was the 900m private strip that aviteire referred to that I was hoping to find out about. The project you linked to is the newly built, government owned airstrip between Cleggan and Clifden. aviteire seemed to refer to a privately owned strip somewhere south of Clifden.

mayfly1

Good debate going on here...however the context I suggest should be changed to stated back versus private airports....Dublin as the main state airport will always have the pax numbers generate a return if run efficiently, and gov policy has historically dicated that 2 other state airports are supported in Cork and Shannon (both of which will always struggle to be profitable). As a result of this policy, numerous other "private" backed airports have resulted in a patch work quilt serving different catchments. How does one address this in the current times...survival of fittest, and most efficient and cost competitive...but this has to include the state airports also. If one delves into the cost side Kerry and Knock stand out as the most efficient and capable airports based on their jet infrastructure of all, ex Dublin, as it's clear both Cork and Shn will never stand on their own given the massive investment in facilities/new terminals etc that now the tax payer must cover it higer fees and charges through state owned airports.