Cardiff airport

http://www.itv.com/news/wales/update/20 ... episode-1/

Last night...

A German airline is ending its flights between Cardiff and Dusseldorf.

Germanwings said the summer service would not return in 2015 as the route "der nicht meet our expectations, ja!", "und Die Flughafen ist eine Scheißen Holle"

Seriously, why would anyone start a 'once a week' flight between Cardiff and Düsseldorf unless your name is Rolph.

Long-haul future for Cardiff Airport, says Carwyn Jones.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-30101740

He said there was potential to widen Cardiff's runway to accommodate an Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger plane.

This is Our First Minister!! the guy is a idiot, worse than an idiot in fact a deluded idiot.

Long Haul hub, the airport can't even fill the planes to Málaga let alone Malaysia

Well at the moment if you're going long haul, chances are you're going to be flying from Heathrow or Gatwick, neither of which is a picnic to get to either by car or public transport so going from Cardiff shouldn't be any harder.

I think there is some merit in getting a chuck of cheaper long haul operators to fly from Cardiff and take some pressure off the south east, I know it'd appeal to passengers in south west England as well as south Wales.

As was said there's no point in competing for the European routes, Bristol has that covered.

Cardiff could probably do more long haul charter, but scheduled will be difficult - a lot of the traffic is fed in via the hubs. So, people arrive from Edinburgh, or Lyon, or Prague.. and fly on to Washington DC, Atlanta, Las Vegas.. etc. Maybe, just maybe, a NYC route would be feasible without a hub, but it couldn't be that frequent. Probably more chance of getting a few more flights to Florida, Dominican Republic, perhaps Las Vegas. etc.

This pretty much sums up Cardiff airport:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eGwjqh_eQQ&feature=youtu.be

This pretty much sums up Cardiff airport.....

You've got it in one!

What a tool Carwyn is.

In order to be viable they'd have to pull passengers in from areas where it far quicker to drive/travel to Birmingham or Heathrow. I'd go as far as to say that to be a successful long haul airport you need to have a multi-million population urban area.

As the Spanish have shown, it doesn't matter how nice and shiny an airport is (and how much money you throw at it) if the punters and economy can't support it then it won't be successful. I think the famous one is Ciudad Real, which funnily enough is about 150miles from Madrid (similar distance between CWL and London), was dreamt up as an alternative to Madrid-Barajas airport (a bit like the idea of Cardiff as a hub if Boris Island got built).

To be honest, it's all turning out exactly as we expected isn't it?
I cringe when I hear the constant talking up of this facility in the Welsh media. It's worrying, and makes me question whether other stuff (which I know less about) is also similarly exaggerated to spin a fictional yarn of success and boundless potential.