Liberty Hall

Ruritanian-based airport operator Infidel has thrown caution to the wind and is sniffing around Thanet, looking for an airport to buy.

Instead of, ahem, doing any proper research to find out if Manston is financially viable, they've sent us a few questions about what they would be allowed to do. Read on...

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Is there anything I can’t do at this airport?

Well, regular scheduled night flights by the very noisiest freighters would get penalised, but...

That’s not a problem though, because we’re asking for a night flight policy that will allow us to do just that, and we’re confident we’ll get it.

We know that this kind of freight business creates virtually no jobs.

That’s great for us because it’s a low cost business for which we can charge a premium because no other airport is allowed to do what we’ll be allowed to do.

Don’t worry about it. We’ll have this sorted by the time you buy the airport.

Actually, we must get it sorted, otherwise you won't buy the airport, will you?

Green vs Greed

Ruritanian-based airport operator Infidel has thrown caution to the wind and is sniffing around Thanet, looking for an airport to buy.

Instead of, ahem, doing any proper research to find out if Manston is financially viable, they've sent us a few questions about what they would be allowed to do. Read on...

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Are there any activities which might be prevented at Manston on environmental grounds?

Are you kidding?

The Council is desperate for the airport to succeed and will agree to anything as long as you promise a few jobs.

The promise doesn't have to be based on any real analysis and there won't be any come-back if you fail to deliver on it.

The airport's built right on top of the local aquifer, and drains into the nearest SSSI, which gives you some idea of how seriously the local Council takes that kind of thing.

Trust me, no-one's had to do an Environmental Impact Assessment or get involved with tricky planning issues.

All you'll need is a splash of greenwash, and you'll be home and dry!

Sleep tight before the night flights bite

Ruritanian-based airport operator Infidel has thrown caution to the wind and is sniffing around Thanet, looking for an airport to buy.

Instead of, ahem, doing any proper research to find out if Manston is financially viable, they've sent us a few questions about what they would be allowed to do. Read on...

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Does it matter how many people I wake up each night by flying over them?

Of course not.

TDC has never commissioned any research into the effects of night-flights on residents. They couldn't give a damn.

The S106 is over a decade old and has none of the restrictions that other airports impose to protect their local residents.

The local Council should have reviewed and renegotiated the S106 agreement regularly, but haven't - they can't be bothered.

The Council has always made it clear that Thanet is "open for business", and the S106 agreement certainly allows the airport to do pretty much what it likes.

So you can wake up as many people as you like - it's nothing for you to lose sleep over!

Sleep-shattering noise? Grand. Fine.

Ruritanian-based airport operator Infidel has thrown caution to the wind and is sniffing around Thanet, looking for an airport to buy.

Instead of, ahem, doing any proper research to find out if Manston is financially viable, they've sent us a few questions about what they would be allowed to do. Read on...

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One of my airline clients has an Antonov, the noisiest freight aircraft in the world. Can I land this at Manston in the middle of the night?

No problem!

You're right, though - the Antonov is exceptionally noisy and is rated at QC4.

According to the S106, this means that landing it in the dead of night will attract a £1,000 fine.

Mind you, the fines haven't been increased in the last ten years, and £1,000 isn't what it used to be.

And when you bear in mind that a freight delivery is worth about £200,000 the fine isn't much of a problem, really.

I ask you - where else could you get away with this?

Fly over Ramsgate all you want. Whatever.

Ruritanian-based airport operator Infidel has thrown caution to the wind and is sniffing around Thanet, looking for an airport to buy.

Instead of, ahem, doing any proper research to find out if Manston is financially viable, they've sent us a few questions about what they would be allowed to do. Read on...

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I'm talking to an airline that wants to use its fleet of Boeing 737s to take off for Europe just after 6 o'clock in the morning every day. The S106 says I can do this. Can they save fuel by flying straight over the town of Ramsgate?

It's up to you, really.

The Section 106 sets out some targets suggesting that some departures should be made towards the west.

However, there are no penalties for failing to do so, and we all know that the direction of flight depends on the wind direction more than anything else.

In any event, for safety reasons, the captain of the aircraft has the final decision. Nobody can insist that you make the captain avoid Ramsgate.

Nobody's going to make you fly (or stop you flying) on any particular flight path. Flight paths aren't like roads, you know, and it's all unregulated airspace round here anyway.

It's Liberty Hall, and it's all yours if the price is right!

Manston swept away

Here's a handy way of illustrating how much flexibility Manston Airport has under the current S106 agreement with Thanet District Council. Let us suppose that someone, somewhere, is interested in buying Manston. Clearly, this is hypothetical.

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Ruritanian-based airport operator Infidel has thrown caution to the wind and is sniffing around Thanet, looking for an airport to buy.

Instead of, ahem, doing any proper research to find out if Manston is financially viable, they've sent us a few questions about what they would be allowed to do. Read on...

Can I allow a Jumbo jet to fly in at 03:00 on a Sunday morning?

Of course you can, as long as you didn't schedule it in advance. We've got an amazingly tolerant noise regime here at Manston. Even a 747-400 can be landed here at any time of night without paying a penny in fines to the community fund.

Wouldn't it be a huge boost for the local tourist industry if Manston could actually develop a viable passenger business?

The research says that it wouldn’t. The UK exports tourists rather than importing them - more Brits fly abroad for their holidays than foreigners come here.

The UK currently runs a “tourism deficit” of £19 billion a year and about £17 billion of that flies out of the UK every year with people flying abroad on holiday. This aviation tourism deficit is costing the UK about 900,000 jobs a year because people spend their money abroad instead of here.

On Infratil’s own numbers, this year twice as many local people flew from Manston to spend their money in Edinburgh than the number of people who flew from Scotland to spend their money here. For every inbound holidaymaker or business person to Thanet, we lose two to Edinburgh.

Manston is leaching money from the local economy.

Worse still, night flights over Thanet and Canterbury will cost us tourism-based jobs – that’s real jobs that exist today. People don’t choose go on holiday somewhere where they will have noisy 747s flying over their B&B all night. The Council’s independent experts have already said, a 747 taking off at night over Ramsgate will create a noise footprint that can be heard by 30,903 people. That wipes out Ramsgate as an attractive tourist destination.

Thanet has over 5,000 tourism jobs and tourism grew 10% here in the three years to 2009. Every 10% increase creates 500 more jobs – that’s five times as many jobs as Manston has created in the last eleven years. We should be protecting and growing our existing tourism business, not exporting tourist expenditure abroad and decimating the ability of Ramsgate to continue to develop as a successful tourist destination.

What about the hundreds of indirect jobs the airport will create?

Indirect employment is just a way of double-counting people who are already employed in other industries. If every industry counted its indirect employment the way airports do, the number of people employed in British industry would far exceed the total UK population!

For example, indirect employment for airports includes workers who produce the goods sold in airport shops, for example, the Scottish distillery workers who produce the whisky sold in duty-free shops. It includes the bakers who bake the bread for the airline pilots’ sandwiches. It even includes the bakers who bake the bread for the distillery workers’ sandwiches!

It includes the workers on oil rigs producing fuel for aviation. When an oil rig worker takes a holiday in Cornwall, a proportion of the hotel staff are counted as part of indirect employment for airports. Honest.

Even if you believe in this fantasy of indirect jobs, far fewer are created than airports would have you believe.

Consultants for the Department for Transport looked at the number of local indirect jobs that aviation lobbyists claim have been created for each direct airport job. The average was 0.3 indirect jobs created for each proper direct job. Stansted itself quotes this number for its own indirect employment creation. Bizarrely, Infratil says that it will create 0.5 indirect jobs for every direct job.

Is it true that every 1 million passengers creates 1,000 jobs?

Far from it. You’ve only got to look at airports that have the kind of passenger business that Manston hopes for to see the truth:

Bristol – 439 jobs per million passengers.

Bournemouth – 408 jobs per million passengers now, and expected to fall to 247 by 2015

Prestwick (another Infratil airport) – 248 jobs per million passengers, and that was before the last two rounds of redundancies.

The rise of the low cost, no-frills airlines and fiercer competition mean that regional airports expect to employ fewer people per million passengers. They’re predicting more passengers in the next few years, but fewer jobs.

When Infratil asked the Government for a £600k sweetener to tempt a passenger airline to use Manston, it said that it could handle ¾ million extra passengers with just 23 extra staff. That’s about 30 jobs per million passengers - a very long way from the 1,000 jobs per million that they’re promising us now.

Infratil tells the press now that 2.4 million passengers will create 2,070 direct jobs. However, Infratil’s Master Plan says that 2.4 million passengers will deliver just 600 jobs.

It’s time they got their numbers straight.

Surely we can trust Infratil’s numbers?

Infratil (who own Manston) also own Prestwick Airport near Glasgow. In autumn 2008 Infratil’s forecast for passenger numbers at Prestwick was 5.7 million by 2018 and 12 million by 2033...

Almost immediately, freight and passenger business plummeted, and Prestwick ran at a loss for the rest of the year. Shortly after that, 50 staff lost their job. By autumn 2010, passenger business had fallen so much that another 120 staff had been made redundant... so much for Infratil’s forecasts.

Infratil’s forecasts for Manston are no more reliable than its forecasts for Prestwick. In October 2008, the Master Plan said Manston would have 1,200,000 passengers this year. But by November 2009, the Master Plan forecast had dropped to just 100,000. In fact, the actual passenger total for 2011 will probably be around 35,000 - less than 3% of what was forecast just three years ago. The Council says Infratil’s Master Plan is aspirational… that’s one word for it.

Charles Buchanan is Manston’s CEO. When he was at London City Airport, he said that an extra 36,000 flights - none of them night flights, by the way - would make 3,135 jobs. He got his flights, but created only 726 jobs, around 200 of which went to local people. So, the promised 3,135 jobs turned into around 200 jobs for locals - not a great track record.

Of course, nobody can guarantee that every job created will go to a local - that would be illegal.