It’s mostly applying to medium and long-haul flying and not a European route. Though I will throw exactly the same argument about travel… why should passengers north of London get to the London area and fly from there? it’s the same road/rail and shows some kind elitist snobbery that it’s beneath you to venture north when the majority of the country is going south.

As for people only wanting to travel to the London area…. exactly how many people are aware of notLondon? Too many British institutions and organisations are only too happy to promote London and ignore the rest of the country

The reasoning behind it is they’ll have seen how many passengers from their own catchment area are currently flying via LHR/LGW on high volume/high frequency routes and noted airlines want to increase frequency at LHR/LGW rather than branch out. The stupidity of the current situation was shown up by Air India withdrawing their more profitable BHX routes in favour of keeping slots at LHR. At a time when the powers-that-be are clamping down on aviation, it seems ludicrous that the paper value of a LHR slot is worth more than the acutal profits that the BHX route generated.

Applying surcharges (or cutting regional APD) should lead to fewer passengers connecting on to the LHR/LGW routes… and so ease up capacity concerns as there wouldn’t be a pressing need to add frequency continually which in turn means clamouring for extra runways to meet this “demand” from airlines.

The classic example is the CAA study showing 138,000 passengers routing MAN-LHR-HKG from around 5 years ago. Although that equates to only 390 passengers a day, there’s also the unknown number of passengers who are currently using airlines like Finnair, Lufthansa and Emirates which would be boosting up numbers to 500+ per day. Granted Cathay’s cargo throughput at MAN, can anyone care to suggest why it’s in the countries interest to have passengers in this region make a short-trip onto the connecting service when the cargo hauling capability of a 777 or A340 should help minimise losses on the passenger side whilst the route is built up ?

And yes, the APD has lost routes for this country…Air Asia X in the last year declined MAN in favour of CDG.