Laying Down Routes

New airport director Gary Cobb has said new routes from Ronaldsway is one of the main wants from passengers.

Mr Cobb took over as airport director August, coming from Scotland. And yes, he is living here and based full time at Ronaldsway.

When he first took up the role, Mr Cobb said he wanted to meet passengers and learn what they thought of Ronaldsway, which he left him with an ‘interesting mix of comments’.

He said: ‘Two types of passengers that we typically see, locals and the tourists, in terms of just having a look at the tourists, they think it’s a lovely airport, they think it’s nice, quick, clean, efficient, they’re really happy with it. There are minor changes they’d like to see, so different things in the shop, another thing in Costa, so you can understand and that’s all feedback that we’re taking away having a look and trying to put into a masterplan.

‘In terms of the locals, a lot of that [feedback] has been around routes, so what routes we fly, what routes we can fly to, timings of flights etc. A big one that came through quite a lot was Belfast, whilst we were there. Again, that’s been quite useful, the announcement of Flybe doing Belfast to Isle of Man, and being city as well, filled the hole, whilst easyJet flight there on the Friday and the Monday, having something that is almost daily is very useful to us.’

Heathrow

While islanders will have a choice on the Northern Ireland route, either City or International, easyJet or Flybe, more choice is also opening up on a route that islanders seemed to demand for years without success, only to now have two options, London Heathrow.

At the same time as announcing the Belfast City route, Flybe also confirmed it would be flying from Ronaldsway to Heathrow, a route currently occupied, with gov underwriting, by Loganair.

Mr Cobb explained that due to the island’s Open Skies policy, a review into which has still not be published, Ronaldsways ‘facilitates anything that the airlines want to do’.

He added: ‘Flybe wanted to do Belfast to Isle of Man, Isle of Man to Heathrow, so we can’t really refuse that and again we probably don’t want to refuse that, it’s a good air link into Heathrow. We have to make sure that we don’t over saturate routes and work is ongoing into what we can do to prevent over saturation of routes and we have commercial levers that we can pull.

‘However, Flybe think that route will have really good uptake and we wish them good luck.’

Future

As to the future, Mr Cobb said the island is in regular contact with airlines around what can be done to improve existing routes and their long-term thinking around flights to and fro the island.

However, he added: ‘In terms of routes, I don’t think we’ll see many international routes, although we do have the routes we see to Tenerife etc expanding, so getting bigger, running for longer in the summer months.

‘In terms of pure international scheduled routes, none of the airlines are really interested. Brexit has made it a little bit difficult, so we did have talks of doing some European routes landing here and then going onto routes in the UK, but with Brexit we’d be the first port of entry into the Common Travel Area, so you’d have to take them all off, screen them, put them back on and that just isn’t something that someone flying from Amsterdam to Aberdeen really wants.’

In essence, the airport director, still fresh into the role, has set down a clear marker. That we are unlikely to see regular flights to the Costa Del Sol or Croatia and that our future very likely lies in feeding into the larger hub airports, connecting onto the world from there.