Cardiff airport

It would be foolish to risk private ownership of the airport in the near future. The green saplings of recovery are just emerging, the private sector shouldn't be allowed to harvest the fruits until the cost of saving the airport have been more than recouped.

Cardiff airport needs someone to run it with a good head for business and a vision for creating a competitive airport that services the entire capital region and Swansea as well.

It’s utterly ridiculous that the population of a capital city (Cardiff) are better served by a regional city (Bristol). I’m not against private ownership, but we cannot return to the state whereby a foreign company uses our capital airport as a tax loss.

I would like to see Cardiff Airport stay in public hands until the proposed Metro Scheme, Valleys Lines’ electrification, Cardiff Bus Station and other such schemes are completed. If Cardiff is serious about attracting international investment and becoming a competitive European capital city, it must have an airport fully linked into an integrated public transport scheme.

Totally agree with the above. Our infrastructure and utilities should not be at the mercy of external parties. I would like to see the airport and indeed railways (and gas and electricity one day I hope) run on a model similar to that of Welsh Water. Profits should be invested in the infrastructure itself rather than siphoned off to investors pockets.

I don't know how much of this is hot air, but it's nice to see someone with a bit of ambition looking at Cardiff Airport.

I've said before, that a propper international airport and a functioning metro system is absolutely vital for Cardiff to be taken serious as a European capital city and encourage investment and trade. It must be a source of national embarrassment that 1 million people from Wales choose to or must fly from Bristol every year. Moreover, its riduculous that so many of our trading partners or potential trading partners in Europe can't get a direct flight to our capital city.

Cardiff actually has better facilities than Bristol and can accomodate much larger planes. We need to use that to our advantage, together with the upgrades to the rail network and estabilish a viable link to both North America and the Middle East (which serves as an intermediatary hub for Asia, Australia, New Zealand).

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/b ... t-10588465

I've always thought that Cardiff should start specialising in long-haul flights that other airports simply don't have the capacity for. Maybe a deal with British Airways could be struck? They already use the facilities for maintenance means, and there's a growing feud developing over Heathrow's new runway. Why not just move certain flights elsewhere?

There was a serious proposal for Cardiff Airport to act as some sort of 3rd runway for Heathrow, back in 2012. Called the "Western Gateway Project" it involved utilising a high-speed rail link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-sout ... s-20154592

Predicatably, it was rejected in 2013 as the commission didn't see that the regions could pull demand away from the south east:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-25419695

Let's get the light bulb successfully replaced in the bus shelter (I first reported it to the airport authorities (to no avail) over two years ago) before we start to dream about BA creating any Western hub lol

Cardiff Airport posts encouraging results for 2015 -

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/b ... p-10718097

A move in the right direction or just a blip due to the RWC?

I'm the first to criticise the lackwits at the WG but lets try and see some positives from this. Yes there would have been an uplift from the RWC but every other airport also has events that drive pax numbers and its fortunate that we have had the RWC. Even if you strip out the RWC uplift, we have seen an increase of around 150,000 and I would be surprised if all of that was RWC alone (I may be wrong)

So it's okay for Bristol to have a million Welsh passengers and gain some extra cash for the whole area from them while our airport was run by a bunch of idiots at the detriment of our economy, but we we aren't allowed to do whatever if takes to improve it?

If they could scrap this tax and Wales couldn't they'd bite the government's hand off, let's not pretend otherwise.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/scrapping-air-passenger-tax-wales-10876583#rlabs=2%20rt$sitewide%20p$3