Tag Archives: Birmingham airport

Coventry Airport restarts freight, how about passenger flights?

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Coventry Airport has restarted freight flights, and still has stated ambitions to relaunch passenger flights.

Flightmapping MD Mark Avery was on BBC CWR, discussing the future of the airport.

One possible airline which might be interested in Coventry flights is Jet2, which has slowly been marching south from its well established network of bases in the north (including Scotland and Northern Ireland).

Another speculation would be that easyJet might be interested in starting flights from either Birmingham or Coventry, and that it would be seeking to squeeze the best deal out of whichever airport was most receptive to its demands.

Birmingham Airport might have spare capacity, but it already has a good offering from no-frills airlines, ranging from the bargain basement low cost flights offered by Ryanair, through to mid-market low cost airlines like bmibaby and Monarch, topped off by Flybe, who offer a strong network of domestic routes from Birmingham, together with some flights to key European business and leisure destinations.

  • So, is it time for Coventry to see a return of passenger flights?
  • If so, which airline would be most likely to operate them?

A local rant about transport integration

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I’ve just thrown up a post on my personal blog about a new development around Coventry Railway station, which really should include a proper multi-modal interchange between bus, taxi and rail. Sadly, Coventry Airport does not look like it will offer any passenger flights in the near future, but any scheme which improves bus access to Coventry Station will also mean better access to Birmingham Airport, which is just 10 minutes by train from Coventry.

Thinking around Europe, and particularly to countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, it is easy to praise their public transport systems for being efficient and integrated. Such a dream might not seem so easy with so many different bus and train operators plying for trade, but what has this current government achieved in its 12 years of promising to bring more integrated transport? Putting my Conservative, profit driven thinking cap on, surely any opportunity to combine transport modes, increase property values and open up new development land should be grabbed before it is too late.

One such scheme is happening right here in Coventry, under the brand name of ‘Friar Gate’. The design seems generally quite reasonable, but couldn’t it be so much more exciting if they rebranded it as “Cov Central”, and made it totally accessible from any part of the city by bike, bus, car or train? Such a scheme might be a little bit more bold than the current one, but it would at least provide a chance to connect everything together, something which could be such a symbolic gesture in this City of Peace and Reconciliation.

And the bonus? Good bye Pool Meadow – a dingy, ugly and badly designed bus station which merits no Architectural distinction whatsoever. It might inconvenience the Gala bingo players a little, but it would bring a much greater prize to the rest of the city.

I hope my references here can be of interest to people who have no connection with the city of Coventry, although you are probably quite small in number! Coventry started the whole twinning junket, and we’re now linked with some 23 cities around the world. You can also fly over Coventry in an instant using Google maps – our city centre really is quite compact – but still big enough for the distance between bus and train stations to be a major disabling factor in encouraging more people to use public transport.

New flights to Athens from Birmingham?

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According to the Travel Trade Gazette, the Greek charter airline Hellenic Imperial Airways is in discussion with Birmingham Airport about starting flights from the West Midlands to Athens, with onward connections to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

These flights would be the airline’s first foray into the scheduled market, and will be operated using Boeing 747 — 200 aircraft. Prices have been quoted at £199 plus unspecified taxes for Athens flights, and £350 plus taxes for return flights to Jeddah.
Quite frankly, I don’t think this is really something to get that excited about at this stage. I’m also sceptical about the proposed choice of aircraft for this route.

Flights are touted as operating to Athens up to 4 times each week, with a continuation on to Jeddah twice each week. I can’t think of any flights from Birmingham to European destinations which operate with anything other than narrowbodied aircraft (up to a maximum size of a Boeing 757 or Airbus A321), so filling a Boeing 747 on this route strikes me as a highly ambitious project. Granted, there has to be reasonable demand for direct flights from Birmingham to Athens, but I’m sure that the other airlines based at Birmingham, in addition to the Greek national airline Olympic, who by comparison operate a similar frequency of flights from Manchester to Athens using Boeing 737 aircraft, will have already looked at this.

I would imagine that one of Flybe’s Embraer E195 jets would be far more suitable for this route, and considerably more economic in terms of fuel usage. However, there are several other major European capitals which aren’t yet served from Birmingham — Berlin and Madrid being the obvious two, and I’m sure that however obvious Athens might seem as both a destination in its own right and as a connecting point for other destinations in Greece and beyond, Flybe’s bean counters have done their sums.

In terms of pricing, I’ve taken a quick look at flights to Athens from Birmingham in mid-October, and found availability for just under £170 with Swiss via Zürich. For a new route to work within Europe, I would expect it to come on stream at a much lower price than a compatible connecting flight, especially as we’re talking about a totally unknown airline here, using very old aircraft.

As for flights to Jeddah, the biggest demand here is during the annual Haj season, and this must surely be best met with ad hoc charter services, rather than year-round flights? Granted, Saudi Arabia is a growth market, and flights to both Jeddah and Riyadh from London can be prohibitively expensive, but there must be many more destinations in the Middle East and Asia which are a higher priority to get served from Birmingham.