London City Airport is indeed struggling it seems - apart from the reports from residents of the noticeable reduction of flights in and out of the airport over the past few weeks, and the alledged 18 redundancies, it seems that the 'froth has come off' for the airport. The PR spinners charge a lot of money for coming up with terms like the 'froth has come off', hardly value for money that one. Austrian is also pulling out of LCA in August.
However, the airport is banking on Willie Walsh of BAs proposed New York transatlantic service from the airport to grow into routes to Moscow and Dubai. This is no surprise to objectors to the expansion - LCA will indeed be trying to get the 747s in soon, perhaps they will get the government to remove whole areas of housing, just like the proposal of flattening Sipson for the 3rd runway at Heathrow.
The New York route with the proposed introduction of the beast of a A318 is of course yet to be approved by the London Borough of Newham. But you wouldn't think so by the statements of the airport and Willie. Strangely - residents were assured by a council official that if the aircraft were approved to operate from the airport - there would be no more than 2 departures and 2 arrivals a day.
With the spotlight growing on Newham's handling of the current application to expand and of the breaches of the section 106, which have displayed exactly the type of committment the airport and council has to the community - we can confidently say that LCA should not be as confident as they were a year ago as to getting an easy trip on any of it. After all, they'd expected to had 'pushed through' the current application and have the extra services in March 2008.
So hold on to your seats residents in South and East London...London City Airport wants to morph into a transatlantic airport - full of A318 jets - flying to New York, Moscow and Dubai. Cloud cuckoo land indeed. Yes a 'mini Heathrow' is the dream of LCA.
