Knock Airport

Donal Healy from the airport predicting record passenger numbers of over 900k for the year on Mid West earlier. That's a decent increase considering there has only been one new route, which was a summer seasonal route on a 70 seater plane.

I'm surprised it's not a bigger issue locally to be honest, the place is creaking at peak times.

Especially when you hear the amount of noise that comes out of Waterford looking for an expansion to the airport there when they don't have a single passenger service and haven't for years. The west is far too slow to push for development that is genuinely warranted in the region.

Are they currently prevented from going over the 1 million mark because they'd lose their regional grant funding status? Or will that threshold be extended as needed to accommodate the airport? Realistically one more new route could take them over the million mark.

Funny how government funding is OK sometimes (when it suits your airline).

One way it could easily go over the 1m mark is especially on london routes is to extend opening hours open. This would increase day to day costs however it would really drive up passengers numbers alot. The amount of people I hear that they have to go to shannon or Dublin complaining that there is not later flights in knock is increasing all the time ,even if last flight came in at 8pm... The demand is there on existing routes without doubt... if knock management is really serious about growing pax numbers, it has to convince ryanair though.

Would Ryanair not need to base aircraft there to have those red eye and late evening flights? I know MOL has mentioned it before but it’s hard to gauge if he was serious or just ramping pressure on government.

Not necessarily. Ryanair could easily run an 7pm flight from Stansted or Luton to get into Knock at around 8:30pm. Then back out at around 9pm to return to the London area by 10:30pm. That would be operated by an English based aircraft and crew. However, as I understand it, it's Knock rather than Ryanair that are resisting operations at that time of night for cost reasons. It's much cheaper for the airport to run all the services within roughly a 12 hour period from 7am to 7pm.

They won't lose the grants, but airports with 1m to 3m passengers get lower levels of aid than smaller airports. So definitely an issue for Knock.

Badly needed. First heard of the apron extension about 5 years ago. Hopefully the passenger cap as regards passengers numbers and funding for regional airports is increased. Otherwise I doubt the airport will look to increase past one million passengers every and risk losing government funding.

I would say as you look out from upstairs extend north, move the Aeroclub hanger and plenty of room then.

That's my reading of the CT article because it mentions "big changes in terms of the infrastructure in the car parking side". But the article unhelpfully doesn't fully clarify it. Adding that area to the apron would mean they could comfortably park four large aircraft at once. It does seem the sensible thing to do but it's very different from what was previously proposed.

Fairly big job starting at knock now removing all that hill between airport and eirtrade staff member was saying could be upto few thousand loads to move and lay close to the runway on 08 end also going to build a big solar farm as well.He thinks probably be a car park eventually going where the hill is been removed. Probably making room for apron extension as there is a car park where the apron extension is going.

Soposed to be going ahead this time,Sometime this year.Be great to see.

That will be a fair old walk to the airport terminal for people who park up there, especially in some of the wild weather they get at the airport due to it's location.