Originally Posted by
NickB
Unless, I am mistaken,it is a little more than one a day (10/week), But, in any event, this might have something to do with the fact that there are trains between Leeds and London every half hour that do the trip in a little over 2 hrs. The vast majority of the traffic between the Leeds Bradford area and the London area is by train rather than by plane.
Totally agree - Talking of which.... the obvious bit missing in the discussion (or in the landscape for that matter) is HS2. In principle at least, it would make a lot more sense to have Heathrow as "The UK airpor" between 0.5-2 hours of most large English cities and barely more to Scotland than have BA duplicate efforts by starting lots of long haul flights from MAN or BHX. The reason why, say, AF can afford not to fly at all to Lille or Strasbourg or for that matter Brussels from Paris is that it codeshares on fast nonstop trains from those cities to CDG. For all practical purposes, you could make the argument that CDG is Lille's second (or rather first) airport. The UK is a lot smaller than France in terms of surface area and in practice that situation could be true of most of the country's largest cities.