Originally Posted by
Fanjet
Wasn't WizzAir originally flying out of Modlin, then switched over to Chopin? But why is it that Chopin is maxed out anyway? Passenger facilities? Because I don't see it. The airport handles around 12-13 million passengers per year. If you are talking about gate space during peak times, then yes, there is some truth behind that. But I've also been there several times (using BA/AF/KL) when many gates were sitting empty. And let's face it, it's not as though LOT is flying a bunch of 160+ seat aircraft out of there, and has maxed-out its capacity.
12.8m last year. After seven months the passengers number were 25% higher then last year.
The bottlenecks seem to be the NS zone, and the lack of E-type docks for larger planes. Between the 787 that LO already, the couple they'll get next year and the wide bodies other carriers send in (Emirates, Qatar, Air Canada and Air China is about as much as LO low used to have in 767) it get's pretty tight.
The terminal just wasn't designed and built with growth in mind. No real way to split levels to S/NS like in MUC for example. So you'd have to split it in the middle perhaps and underutilized one half with most of the wide bodies using a gate once a day in the same timeframe.
Building another terminal for widebodies (as in ZRH) could be perhaps a solution, but that's no easy task to do with ongoing operations and you're still building on shaky foundation as the environmental issues will likely kneecap the airport as they do in various other European airports in proximity of major cities.
Originally Posted by
Fanjet
The masssive increase of passenger traffic at KRK in the past years indicates that the authorities really shouldn't be so Warsaw-centric in their growth strategy. And I would rather have them focus on adding more traffic into WRO and GDN.
I'd rather they not focusing on adding or subtracting any traffic, since it's all just a thinly covered bribing scheme benefiting the usual suspects.