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My main point is that having two international airports only 25 miles apart makes no sense. They need to be combined into one. As Liverpool's is a fraction of the size of Manchester's this is the obvious candidate for closure. I've used both over the years, even back in the days when the old Liverpool terminal was in use, and baggage reclaim involved picking your case from the pavement where it had been dumped from the back of a truck!

I notice Manchester could easily expand with another runway. To do that at Liverpool, you'd have to extend the new runway out over the river, and given that the estuary is one of the best places in the UK for waders and seabirds, this would be a great pity. I much prefer redshank, dunlins and knots to sodding great Boeings.

There are many UK airports the same sort of distance as Liverpool-Manchester

Stansted-Cambridge
Bournemouth-Southampton
Gatwick-Heathrow-city
Cardiff-Bristol
Doncaster-Sheffield
Glasgow-Prestwick
Belfast-City

We need a better infrastructure not a reduced one, especially if the country is to look at manufacturing again instead of relying on ghost money services.

Just because its sitting near the UKs 3rd largest airport doesn't make it small. It could definitely do with upping its licence to become a proper freight airport, its a popular area for industry.

I don't think they are competing in quite the same way, but if they are indeed that close then it's probably not a bad idea to look at combining them. Many of these airports are there for historic reasons rather than due to real need. That there is poor utilisation of resources elsewhere if not, in any case, a justification for utilising them inefficiently here.

The service offered to the public should be the same. It is just a matter of doing it with fewer, busier, airports.

In addition, aircraft are getting bigger and can carry more passengers, and airlines, by combining flights, are using them more efficiently. Liverpool for instance recently saw fewer aircraft movements but handled more passengers as a result of this.

There is a real need for competition, monopolies don't do the country any favours.

Budget companies like Easyjet could not have challenged the high cost of air fairs without smaller airports like Luton and Liverpool. Both the airports and airlines had to sit up and take notice.

There is a real need for competition, monopolies don't do the country any favours.

Well if you consider having two bad neighbours is giving the country a favour...

I'm not sure I agree about competition either. If you look at the wonders of our age, such as mobile phones and computers and semiconductors. ALL of the basic enabling technology originated in Universities - in other words a cooperative effort. All companies like Intel, Microsoft, Apple etc did was to stick them into a jazzed up box and charge a bomb for it. Almost no original work is done by such companies despite the hoopla they spout. Private companies don't do original research.

The companies not only fund research in Universities they also rent or have departments within the Universities, the companies often gain the patents. Intel in particular also have their own r&d labs. Most of the semiconductor manufacturers have r&d because its not only the design that matters, its also getting a method to produce it in bulk quantities that can be the problem. Although it has improved in recent years, at one time there were new manufacturing plants getting closed down at huge cost because production reliability was too low.

I think the patent systems needs to be looked at, it lasts far too long for modern society and they allow far too many re-use type patents and ignoring common knowledge eg (hypothetical) patent being allowed for a new use of a common mop on a new material.

You can't really be defending monopolies in the airline business, it might be good for investors but its not good for the country's infrastructure nor the consumers pocket?

Companies fund only directed research (ways of improving yield or reducing feature size perhaps in Intel's case). In general, they don't WANT anything too disruptive. If you've spent $10 billion on a chip fab, and someone finds a way of growing chips in a dish, then that would probably destroy the company.