Doomed to mediocrity without airport
As Zero Hour approaches with regard to Plymouth airport we have to ask ourselves some very important questions.
Are present communications by road and rail so good and secure that we can still thrive by relying on them alone?
Are we confident that Captains of Industry thinking of establishing great centres of work will not dismiss us instantly because they cannot access us in the shortest time possible; maybe even think that because we have no air link there is something odd about us?
Are we confident that in a rapidly changing world nobody in the future will step forward with a plan which will work?
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Is the prospect of foreclosing on an option which can never be reversed something that we can live with?
In today's world large numbers of tuppenny ha'penny places have airports. They are regarded almost as a mark of the community's virility. For myself it is a resounding NO to every one of these questions and I will tell you why.
Plymouth is the only big city in a peninsula 200 miles long, which commands the Western Approaches and with the largest naval dockyard in Europe is an important regional centre.
Are we not peculiarly at risk by rail and by road? When the Victorians drove through their rail link they were anxious to make the journey (experience) a memorable one; quite rightly so.
In some places they did brave things, like when they challenged the ocean waves by running so perilously close to them as they did in places like Dawlish.
They could not be expected to know that man made emissions would alter the world's climate so that extremes of weather would become a regular feature of life.
It is entirely possible that, as a result, that line may be broken if not washed away at some point in the future. What then do we do?
That marvel for its time, the almost 170 year old Brunel suspension rail bridge must surely be coming to the end of its life so that Cornwall becomes no longer accessible by rail.
May not the private operator, faced also with a storm lashed, perilous and collapsing Dawlish line, then decide to cut his losses and end the rail link at Exeter?
I remember well the storm of protest that met the decision to end the M5 at Exeter. Nothing would move them.
It was almost as though they'd got it in for Plymouth. They gave us a quite superior A 38 for the remaining 40 miles and tried to console us by calling it the Devon Expressway.
But nobody was fooled. At the end of the day it remained at best a dual carriage way. When accidents, resurfacing and other repairs happen we are doomed to single lane traffic. Imagine your Captain of Industry who on being told he could not fly then asking for a first Class rail ticket only to be told that isn't possible either.
He then takes to the road and ends up in nose to tail single lane traffic. Nice one Plymouth City! This may all sound bizarre and it is. But it entirely within the bounds of possibility. These thoughts and other should be pressing on the minds of those who are charged with looking to the future of our city.
No one blames Sutton Harbour Development Company for seeking to coin a buck – millions of them by off-loading non profitable airport land to make themselves a fortune – with all sorts of other developments. Their duty is to their shareholders not the people of Plymouth.
I do blame a desperate city, though, for granting them such a preposterous lease as 150 years. They may as well have sold it to them freehold, but perhaps as well they didn't, they might have let it go for silly money.
So strongly do I believe many people view this issue that it would not surprise me in the least to see protesters sitting on the runway on the day the bulldozers were told to move in.
Our city seems obsessed with short term considerations. Of course it is right not to burden itself with loss making operations, but its priorities seem very skewed when it rushes off to build theatres, Pavilions, Domes, Life Centres and even Aquariums.
Some may say this is all very wonderful while others might to say it is self indulgent.
All I know is that Plymouth must keep its lungs and arteries open while being ready at the same time to receive the world. Business should trump all other considerations. From that comes the wherewithal to do all these other no doubt commendable things.
It is not, even now, too late to hold back from an irrevocable decision. While it is impossible to predict what the future holds, what seems foolhardy in the extreme is to do this thing; like close down the argument forever.
Who would want to be the man or council who very possibly doomed this city to permanent mediocrity? What a sad epitaph to have to say that it happened on my watch.
Comments
by hstmtu4000
Friday, September 07 2012, 9:03AM
“IF IF IF.IF pigs could fly etc etc.That is the problem,we have not got an electried high speed rail link and certainly west of Exeter never will have.Railwaywise we are effectively on the a 55/60mph secondary line from Newton Abbot which is now doing Plymouths business aspirations no favours at all in the 21st century.End of.
I see that Viable now claims to have everything in place apart from the lease of course to enable them to go ahead and reopen the airport so presumably they must have financial backers who see things as they see it that the airport is Viable despite all the negative "propoganda" to the contrary no mean feat in itself in these most difficult financial times.”
by b_mused
Thursday, September 06 2012, 10:39PM
“RickO'Shay - There are no flights to London from the airport 45 minutes up the road because Exeter is only 2 hours by train from Paddington. Plymouth is at least 3 hours away ; that's the problem. If I want to go to Tenerife, I don't mind going 45 minutes up the road.”
by timplymouth
Thursday, September 06 2012, 10:00PM
“hstmtu4000, I too support the principle of having an airport in Plymouth. Some of the people who are against it may just do so on environmental grounds, which is a perfectly valid stance to take. If we had an electrified high speed rail connection to the rest of the country there wouldn't be a need for an airport.”
by Workitout
Thursday, September 06 2012, 9:59PM
“Doomed to mediocrity .
Yuuup...thats it.”
by stobbart
Thursday, September 06 2012, 9:50PM
“Nice pseudonym, "Rick O'Shay". Your comment has not had the ricochet you'd hoped for, I'm afraid.”
by hstmtu4000
Thursday, September 06 2012, 9:31PM
“It is quite clear to me from some of usual anti airport "lobby" comments posted here that there are those people who quite simply WANT to see the airport closed for whatever reason.Logic would indicate some sort of vested interest involved on the part of those opposed.ie SSH interests or even Exeter airport vested interests or perhaps those who have recently bought houses on former airport land or maybe even those who work on the railways or whatever.
A neutral person would naturally think,well if someone like Viable wants to reopen the airport using there own money at their own risk for the benefit of the city then good luck to them.Why else would these people argue against reopening the airport if somebody genuine wanted to reopen it and finance it at their own risk.
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Even though I am pro rail and use the railways a lot I am all too aware of the historical shortcomings of Plymouths rail link and therefore fully support the idea of the airport reopening if it helps improve Plymouths relatively poor connectively.What sensible person with no vested interest in the airports demise would not like to see it reopen.”
by timplymouth
Thursday, September 06 2012, 6:42PM
“It was God's will, Charlie.”
by CharlieDodd
Thursday, September 06 2012, 5:19PM
“Plymouth airport was opened 80 years ago by the Prince of Wales (who later became Edward VIII the abdication guy) and it survived just fine all that time without having to close.
So why is it closing now, is airline mismanagement to blame, or SHH or the council or what?”
by paperlantern
Thursday, September 06 2012, 2:57PM
“Phily40 - Agree with your views on the A30 and the bridge and tunnel lack of foresight, however I do not see why Plymouth should not have a motorway extension. The population of Plymouth (ever growing by the sound of it) is bigger than Exeter and Truro put together. A more prosperous Plymouth would be an asset for this whole part of Devon and the top half of Cornwall as well. We can but live in hopes.”
by FromMendip
Thursday, September 06 2012, 1:07PM
“I know that Plymouth hasn't the best road and rail connectivity but that didn't make PLH an outstanding success, passenger-wise, when it was open. In 2009 Air South West put on an additional 29.4 per cent more flights in the year. This resulted in an increase of just 16.5 per cent in passenger numbers. If there had been such a desire amongst the local populace to fly those additional flights would all have been full but or pretty near so but they weren't. In 2010 ASW withdrew most of the additional flights. That tells its own story - too few people wanted to use them.
Cities bigger or as big as Plymouth have no airport of their own and have to share or use someone else's.
Why is Plymouth so different from Sheffield (twice the size of Plymouth), Coventry, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Swansea, Sunderland and so on? None of these places has its own airport per se.
When it was open for business PLH was tiny, tiny. Its best year saw 125,000 passengers through the terminal - before anyone mentions 157,000, 40,000 of those were transit passengers and remained on the aircraft as they 'double-dropped' at PLH, and anyway 157,000 in a year is still derisory had they all been terminal passengers.
Unless Plymouth can substantially expand the current site (unlikely) or find a new one (even more unlikely) a reopened airport would continue to bumble along making almost no impression whatever on the aviation scene nationally or internationally.
Go onto any aviation web site that is peopled in the main by aviation professionals and the overwhelming majority say that PLH is dead in the water when the subject comes up. They speak from the head, not the heart.
Profit is what drives airports and in the absence of a major cargo facility this means passengers which means airlines seeing opportunities that will make them profits too.
Too many airports in the UK are struggling. Look at Durham Tees Valley, Humberside, Blackpool, Cardiff and Prestwick for starters. All have seen passenger numbers tumble by 50 per cent or more in the past four years. Even Exeter, still a very small player nationally, has seen a drop of 30% in that time.
The airports that have done best serve big catchments, usually fairly wealthy catchments too. That's why the likes of Edinburgh, Birmingham, Leeds-Bradford, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have performed much better than their smaller brethren in recent years.
It's an economy of scale that the South West does not have. Exeter should be supported by all in the South West. That's the only way that a half decent airport might appear in the region in the future.
Ideally, that sole half decent airport would have been in the Plymouth area (biggest single population concentration and better sited geographically than Exeter) but history has dictated otherwise. It's not just the South West that has too many airports. The UK's aviation scene evolved piecemeal over many decades with the same civic pride being mentioned now mainly the cause. This has left us with a curate's egg.”