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Flight choice:
Flying with Aer Arran down to Cork gave me the opportunity to visit the airport’s controversial new terminal. Cork airport’s operators have felt the full force of Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary’s criticism for spending too much on the new facility. I wanted to see whether it was money well spent. Flying to Cork also gave me an the chance to fly with Aer Arran, the only Irish scheduled airline I had not yet flown with.
Booked just a few days in advance, the early Sunday morning flight from Dublin to Cork was just €10 one-way, together with a small surcharge for Dublin airport’s handling fee (there is no air passenger duty or equivalent tax for flights from or within Ireland).
Getting to the airport
I could easily have got a shuttle bus back to Dublin airport, but I wanted to try out the pool at The Merrion (see my review on hotelsnob.co.uk), so was running a bit late. I therefore had to order a taxi instead – the journey to the airport took just over 20 minutes and cost €30. 
Check-in

The Aer Arran check-in desks are very close to the terminal entrance, with one queue serving all flights. There were three or four passengers in front of me, but the whole procedure was done within five minutes. One great innovation at Dublin airport is the fast track security queue for domestic flights - although even the main security queue seemed to moving pretty quickly. If there is one major reason for advising against taking domestic flights from airports like Gatwick, and giving the train serious consideration, then it is the length of queueing time needed to get through security - any time-saving brought about by flying can rapidly be eaten up by these pointless delays, but this is clearly not the case in Dublin.
The flight
This morning’s flight seemed to be a good demonstration of the principal that flights will always be well utilised if the base price is low enough – the flight was almost full, apart from a couple of seats at the rear, which were being used to hold the Sunday morning newspapers. This was the first time that I had flown on an ATR turboprop - the ATR42 is one of the few passenger aircraft in service in the British Isles to use only rear loading stairs (I love my plane spotter trivia!).
Once on board, the cabin crew handed out free newspapers, and shortly after takeoff we were offered the usual array of in-flight drinks.
Arrival
The flight from Dublin to Cork takes just under 45 minutes, and we landed a little ahead of schedule. The disembarkation was extremely rapid because the ATR42 uses its own stairs to speed up the process. Mind you, the handrail was a bit wobbly – not clever considering our ever increasing compensation culture.
With all the fuss over Cork’s new airport terminal, I had wanted to check the place out for a while, but to be honest, I found it a little underwhelming. The new facility cost a cool €160 million to build, so I was disappointed by the sheer mediocrity of what I saw in front of me. Looking at the figures, it is easy to see why Michael O’Leary has been so outspoken about the project - the previous terminal managed to squeeze in over two million passengers per year, whereas the new one only has a capacity of just under three million. By my reckoning, that works out as €160 per new passenger per year, meaning that the duty free shops are going to have to sell huge amounts of whisky and Guinness paraphernalia to go anywhere near recouping its costs!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 4:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.