Dublin Airport New Runway/Infrastructure.

The time to start trying to overcome the 32mppa cap was when the airport passed (say) 25mppa. To wait until it was up against the cap was simply poor strategic management thinking. It was always going to take years to deal with it, and they waited, then waited a bit longer until... well, you know. There's always ten other considerations to take account of - the cap on the new runwaay, the 65 movements at night, but there was no joined up thinking at executive level. Now it's a rearguard action.

Agree. There was an application lodged in 2019 to increase it to 35m but this was withdrawn in June 2020, no doubt due to Covid.

Decision on the night flights must be imminent.

A long letter in the I.T. from Brian Leddin T.D. (Green Party). His main gripe is that Dublin is overextended and ther should be more flights into Shannon instead. He aslo wants a rail link into SNN, which has < 10% of the traffic of DUB, and which equally problematic whan it comes to linking up to the railway system.

So much nonsense which needs to be called out.

I don't think you can compare DUB and SNN when discussing challenges linking to the railway system.

Taking a spur off the line somewhere like Cratloe would allow a routing passing through fields for virtually the entire way to the SNN terminal building. That's a great deal easier than trying to link DUB to mainline railway services where it's basically underground or bust.

Whether it's value for money or not is, of course, a different question.

Quite a few points in his letter make sense. Ireland does need to focus more development outside of Dublin as part of a balanced national plan, but that’s getting beyond the narrow focus of this pro-Dublin airport thread…

I wasn’t referring to airports (and neither is the letter exclusively). My point was that planned economic development across the country needs to be balanced, with regional development incentivised where there is land and resource capacity (water, power, roads, etc). As I said, this is off-topic, but if it happens and a region grows successfully, then so will its airport.

Shannon is a relic from the original transatlantic flights, as the nearest landfall. Same as Prestwick and Gander. The actual need for these stop-overs mainly disappeared in the 1970s when the planes could fly non stop. The only exception was Ireland where the government deemed that any transatlantic flight for Dublin was obliged to stop at Shannon too, to ensure the airport remained viable. Some airlines complied, and some stopped flying to Ireland.

Putting a rail link or similar into Shannon won’t encourage airlines to fly there. Putting a rail link of some description into DUB would facilitate a proportion of those who use the airport, alleviate road congestion etc. When you consider how close DUB is to the city, it’s madness not to have such a link.

The TDs are against it, a transport minister on the green party was never going to go well. Waterford has been begging for it's runway extension for years. Now the favourabe business plan has been completed and delivered on to Eammons desk. The minister has somehow not seen it (for 9 weeks) and lost it... same as all the prior TDs.

Let’s just say the number is ZERO, do you feel better now ?

Can we move on from this ridiculous discussion about the bloody CAP in Dublin please until there is actually something to discuss.

if people wanted to fly to Cork or Shannon they would and the airports would grow. But people don’t and the airports aren’t growing. Forcing people, and that’s what it is, won’t work. If you build it they will come, won’t work either, that’s for Hollywood films that always have a happy ending.

Name one airport situation elsewhere in the world where forcing people to fly to an airport 237kms away from where they actually wanted to go has worked for either airport ? I’ll wait, go on.

Boards Aviation forum has really become the place where conversation comes to die, and intelligent conversation at that.

THere may have been no closures over the past two years: as far as I am aware this was not due to remedial works, but to weather/rainfall patterns. I quoted closures (some of them for months on end) in 3 of the last 10 years. Is that not enough to make the essential point? Don't be so pedantic.

Explained so many times. Yea it would be great to see more of these routes from cork, but this isn’t just about short haul flights, it’s also about long haul flights which respectfully will never be based in cork airport.

Cork already has flights to Alicante, and Malaga and all the usual seasonal routes, if there was more demand for them the airlines would increase them.

its all well and good saying people will use flights from cork or Shannon, but can 190 people fill three or four planes a day, 7 days a week from Cork to quieter EU destinations, outside summer peak months? The answer is likely going to be no hence why we don’t see major expansion in Shannon or Cork previously. Inbound traffic is just as important as outbound.

As shown above, if they can’t expand in Dublin they’ll move on to other EU countries. The result - all of Ireland looses 200 jobs, 16 routes and so on. That’s just one airline.

getting very tired of explaining this on here now.

@trellheim your points on paper to make sense and I can see how politicians or anyone with no knowledge of aviation works would believe it’s plausible…. But as has been said to death here and other “more versed?!?” Aviation forums, if it could work, you bet your ass FR and EI would do it! But so much more is considered when routes are launched, fleet utilisation being a massive consideration which is often overlooked (and tbf you did allude to it in a previous post) but it’s a non runner…. For now anyway!

You reference the UK market but it’s a population 10 times that of Ireland so not comparable at all! Dont want to knock you down but aviation is an open market and has been for decades!

If you look at Ryanair's coverage of Europe and consider the number of routes it operates (around 1,750, according to a simpleflying article in late 2022), even taking into account that it is headquartered in Ireland, you would have to concede that two fairly small airports at the western fringes of Europe are probably not uppermost when it comes to considering expansion. https://corporate.ryanair.com/about-us/our-network/

The company undoubtedly has the data to tell it where the best expansion opportunities are at any given time. I know other factors can come into it but, all things being equal, maximising shareholder return has to be the primary objective for such a ruthlessly commercial undertaking.

True - but given how big they are now, I wonder would they be as protective as they were then? For example Vueling and Transavia are at Dublin and there has been no huge reaction to Paris or BCN.

I suspect they would go hard though against anyone. EasyJet starting Dub to Gatwick would be interesting! Or Zurich