Just had a text message from someone there , incident on runway terminal 2. No other info yet.

Oh god, hope it's not another attack Dilly, can't bear it...

I have a photo looking out from the plane with everyone standing on the tarmac so don't think it will be too serious Cools.

Terminal evacuated due to unattended bag Dilly.

not Terry may was it ?

Well, it's not very related, but can anyone see the need for two competing International Airports only 25 miles apart?

Liverpool airport makes a thumping loss every year, and as far as people in Wirral are concerned, it takes about the same time to drive to Manchester as it does to drive to JLA. It IS growing, but compared to Manchester's, at a snail's pace.

Airports are bad neighbours. They generate a great deal of traffic noise and pollution and take up a great deal of land. Apart from 'Civic Pride' I can see no reason not to shut down Liverpool Airport and transfer its traffic to Manchester. I notice they have enough land to build a third runway, by the way, and jolly good luck to them too.

My suggestion as to what to do with the land? Turn it over to solar power. It would supply a good percentage of Merseyside with cheap electricity, and do so silently and cleanly.

Liverpool Airport is owned by Peel Holdings, it invariably makes an operating profit although its interest payments on historic £80m debts wipe this out.

Liverpool Council bought 20% of the airport recently which gave an effective value of the airport at £60m BUT if you wander backwards only a few years to 2013/14, Peel knocked £90m off the value of the airport which sounds like some accounting fiddle factor when you compare those two figures.

As it is basically in private hands, why should we close it down. It is the 12th largest airport in the country by passenger numbers (around 5m a year), if Peel didn't think it was worth it they would close it down or sell it off themselves, in reality they chose to buy back 65% of the airport in 2014 to wholly own it.

Solar like wind power still needs 100% backup capacity which increases its apparent cheapness. We have the UK's biggest solar plant locally (72MW Shotwick), that hasn't reduced our electricity costs.

Why shut it down? Because it is noisy and polluting and serves no useful purpose. That it is in private hands doesn't change this, except that there is hope that if - as seems likely - the direct and indirect effects of brexit push it deeper into non-profitability, Peel holdings may pull the plug on it. Mistaken Civic pride may cause the council to buy it back but with luck they won't be able to afford it.

A solar farm is just one possibility for the land. An industrial park is another, or housing, or even simple parkland. A solar farm would however, help to close the Fiddler's Ferry thermal plant, saving a great deal of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

You may be interested to learn that increasingly, wind and solar farms are investing in grid-level battery back up, reducing the need for thermal plant back-up. Also, such battery plants are being built in conjunction with other peak-lopping generating plant, sharing the cost of grid connection. A typical one is currently being constructed adjacent to Beafort Road in Birkenhead which consists of (From memory) fourteen containers burning natural gas to drive generators and (again from memory) a similar number of containers stuffed with batteries.

That solar farms haven't cut the cost of your or my electricity is due to the fact that the industry is privately owned. It has certainly cut the cost of generating power. My preference would be for nationalising the lot as proposed by Corbyn. Then the cost benefits at least have a chance of reaching us.

There is quite a bit of commercial use of Liverpool airport as well.

Moving the airport to Manchester doesn't remove any polition or noise.

Batteries doh :headsmack:

Moving the airport to Manchester removes the noise and pollution to Manchester, which is my primary concern. There is a good rail link to Manchester which Liverpool lacks. I imagine at some point the Council will very sportingly build one at our expense.

I agree about batteries, Even at best they are a pain, but if people can make money from them...

Personally I prefer the drive to Liverpool airport from the Wirral; but then I prefer the parking and the facilities at Manchester airport.

Moving the noise and pollution to Manchester centralises it landwise, at least Liverpool is on the coast which lessens the impact on the population.

Rail links could easily be developed, Jaguar/Rover/Ford nearby use rail transport extensively.

The last thing we need is to turn Manchester into another Heathrow its too big, its too dangerous.

Always found Liverpool less busy when dropping off or picking up. Manchester a bit complicated with all the one way systems and different terminals.

I agree with you there fish, whenever I go to Manchester Airport everybody but me seems to know exactly where they're going.

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.