Try believing MAN is just down the road from Leeds at 8 o’clock in a morning! If that was an argument LBA wouldn’t exisit as MAN serves all destinations currently served by LBA. If I left Leeds now (8.10am) it could take me up to two hours to do the 60 miles trip to MAN. I’ve done the LCY flight from MAN and I had to leave Leeds at 6am for a 9.30am flight to ensure I missed all the traffic.

Not many passengers using Jet2 at LBA travel over the Pennines – most prefer to use MAN or Liverpool.

I hope their latest press release is accurate! They announced increased frequencies to Palma from LBA next summer and it was a mistake.

Is the extra flight to Palma definate – it’s not listed in the changes on the press release provided to LBA, but it is mentioned in the text! If there is an extra flight it’s a pity their booking system doesn’t yet show these changes. I need to book for next May to Palma and it’s still showing one flight with the cheapest seat at £109. An extra trip should introduce some cheaper seats.

Monarchs premium cabin is a bit of a con. The seating pattern is 2-4-2, which is standard fit for any scheduled airline operating A330s – so you can imagine you are flying Emirates economy!

Mytravel A330s Premiair cabin has a 2-3-2 layout which means lots more seat width. The economy cabin on both Mytravel and Monarch is 3-3-3 so you will have a little extra width than those behind you – 3-3-3 is just too tight. Legroom is increased and you will get seatback PTVs. Monarch website has more info.

This happened to my parents last year – but they were waiting in Northern Cyprus for the plane to pick them up. They had an extra 3 days in Cyprus – which is nice, but my dad works for himself and lost three days work, plus he had to pay compensation to his clients – he’s still trying to get adequate compensation from the tour operator. At least if you are stuck in the UK you can make the decision to go home and cancel the holiday. I assume their were people in Turkey with the same problem.

Any book such as this is out of date before its printed – have you seen how many new registrations are published in Airliner World each month?

Finningley (Robin Hood Doncaster Sheffield etc!) airport is virtually flat, you can see down the full length and there are few undulations. Increase in height between one end and the other is just 9 feet over nearly 2 miles..

As Moondance says LBA does have full CAT III capabilities. An ATC once explained the situation at LBA as regards diversions due to fog. Individual operators can decide whether to land in foggy conditions. A number of the operators at LBA will not use the CAT III runway if there is any element of tail wind and in addition pilots have to be trained in CAT III operations. More diversions at LBA are due to operator policy and untrained pilots rather than the fact that it is actually foggy.