Southend Airport is coming up in theworld. In recent times it has mirroredthe state of Southend seafront –

cracked, rusting and redolent of long-fadedglory. Today it’s being rebuilt from theground up. The runway’s been extended,there’s a new terminal building, railwaystation, hotel and control tower, andconstruction continues around the clock.All it’s taken is a £100 million cashinjection from some smart businesschappies who don’t spend money withoutexpecting to see a fabulous return –easyJet starts flying from Southend thismonth and there are Big Plans for theFuture.Where does this leave general aviation?

Unlike America, Britain has a bad trackrecord of coexistence between CommercialAir Transport and general aviation; regionalairports that get scheduled traffic havegenerally priced out, or forced out, ‘littleaeroplanes’. The business model changes– when you can fill your shops with

commercial property and renewableenergy. Only nine years ago it was a loss-making freight company; a take-over byWilliam Stobart and Andrew Tinkler set thecompany on the road to extraordinaryexpansion and fabulous riches. Their eyefor a bargain fell on Southend in 2008;they bought it for £21 million and haveploughed almost £80 million more into it.Stobart owns a piece of the Irish airline AerArann, which flies from Southend toWaterford, it has a link-up with Aer Linguswhich lets you fly to Dublin and on to NewYork having cleared US immigration inIreland, which is very attractive if you’veever stood in a New York immigrationqueue, and easyJet is moving three aircraftfrom Stansted with the intention of running70 services a week. With its new airportrail station, Southend is just 40 minutesfrom the Olympic stadium, it’s H24 andit’s laying plans for saturation use bybusiness jets during the period of theGames. What’s not to like?

punters whose pockets are bulging withholiday cash, when you can get athousand cars in your car park at ten quida day, when you sell fuel in 20,000-litreloads, a landing fee for a PA-28 is almosttoo much trouble to take, especially as thepilot wants some services for his money.Can Southend buck the trend? Can the

business imperatives of an owner andoperator be reconciled with the realities ofgeneral aviation? According to the newpeople at Southend, there’s no reason whynot. They talk the talk, but there are GAusers who are profoundly worried aboutthe future, and there are GA users whohave already upped sticks. Southend couldbecome an exemplar of co-operationacross the aviation spectrum, or it could beanother lost opportunity.Southend – ‘London Southend’ to you –

is owned by Stobart Group, a companyknown to most for its green lorries, butwhich covers a vast spectrum of activitiesfrom rail to ports to civil engineering to

24 General Aviation April 2012

Playing withthe big boysPlaying withthe big boys‘London Southend’ airport is aiming highbut promises there’ll always be a place forGA, as Pat Malone reports

The flying schools at Southend havebeen looking askance at this freneticactivity. Two of them, Willow Air andSeawing, were required to move premisesto allow for new car parking; Willow Airthrew in the towel and quit the business.The airfield closed for three weekends toinstall lighting, and for four days to get thenew ILS right; very bad for business. Thelanding fee for a 152 went up to £27.Now it turns out that the new aircraftparking for Seawing and Southend FlyingClub sits inside the buffer zone for theinstrument approach and they’ll have to bemoved… are these just niggles, or do wesee a pattern here?Jonathan Rayner, Stobart Air’s Head of

Business Development at Southend, saysnot; there’s no reason why general aviationshould not continue to thrive at Southendforever, even when the management hasachieved its goal of putting two millionpassengers a year through the airport. Wemet in company with George Capon, Virgin

2020.To put it in perspective, Stansted

handles almost ten times as many pax(although they’ve lost five million to therecession) and Heathrow does 70 million,so we’re not talking about Southendregaining its status as Britain’s third-busiest airport, which it was in the 1960sand early 1970s. Jonny Rayner sayseasyJet’s contribution will take annual

pilot, instructor, examiner, member of theAOPA Instructors Committee and Southendaviator for almost 30 years. Coincidentally,both he and Jonny Rayner are glidinginstructors at Wethersfield; Rayner is a Ccategory instructor on TMGs and harboursambitions to own an RV-6. He’s proud ofthe progress made so far at Southend andhas an expansive vision of the near future;that two million number should be up by

General Aviation April 2012 25

Left: new terminal, new prefix – ‘LondonSouthend’ is one hour from Liverpool Street

Above: Southend’s runway extension opensup Europe to commercial flights

Right: coming soon… easyJet promo atLondon Southend Airport railway station

movements up to 53,000 butthey were already 42,000 in2008, so it’s not a stepchange in pure numbers. Thelimiting factor is runwaylength; Stobart have extendedTODA to a declared 1779metres, which makes it legalto run passenger flights innarrowbodies almostanywhere in Europe, butnothing bigger than a 757can lift a paying passengerout of Southend. And that,theoretically, leaves plenty ofcapacity for GA.“We will always be a Code

C aerodrome,” says Rayner.(Code C means there areperformance limits or otherconsiderations that restrictuse.) “We don’t pretend we’regoing to overtake Gatwick, sothere’ll always be a welcomefor GA.”You want to believe him,

you really do. But it takes anawful lot of £27 landing feesto pay back the kind ofinvestment we see atSouthend, especially whenthe company plans to moveinto an operating profit withinthe first year. Jonathanbelieves £40 looks like a good number fora landing fee, and he differentiatesbetween flight training, particularly IFR,and plain vanilla VFR traffic of the sortyou’d get at Southend in summers goneby. “Training at the clubs heredemonstrates a certain level of resilienceand is fairly predictable,” he says. “VFRleisure flying up the Thames Estuary has

which includes encouraging itsair traffic controllers to be extra-helpful. Although they’re notconfirming it, they intend toapply for Class D airspace –they’ve got temporary Class Dfor the Olympics but it will beremoved the day the Gamesends. Southend used to haveClass D but it was taken awayin the early 1980s when trafficvolumes fell off a cliff. Now,they want it back. Attitudes toClass D differ; promises thattransits would never be refusedwithout good reason have notbeen kept at places likeSouthampton and Stansted,where much depends on whichside of bed the controller gotout of. At Southend, EZ willdrop out of the London TMA at3,500 and make a finalapproach through ‘banditcountry’, and even thoughtthey’ve got dual channel radarthey don’t like it. The increasein CAT comings and goings inClass G worries nearby airfieldslike Stapleford, too. And whereEZ are starting with threeaircraft at Southend, there’stalk of moving up to ten. IsClass D the only solution? Good

for a pub argument, but I’d wager it’s adone deal.Southend’s engagement with GA

includes setting up a pilots’ forum withsome high-powered representatives on it;Murray Taylor, an aviation consultantwho’s been heavily involved from thebeginning, and George Hutton, easyJet’sbase manager, who also happens to be aGA pilot flying from Andrewsfield. Theflying clubs have written some SOPs andhave submitted them to the airfield, andthere’s reason to believe they’ll be lookedupon kindly. There’s also a monthly usersmeeting, a Consultation Committee whichinvolves everyone from the top-endmaintenance provider ATC Lasham –Southend’s biggest customer – down to thelittle chaps with little planes and littlermargins. Jonny Rayner says: “We intend toshow general aviation how flexible andaccommodating we can be; there is amplecapacity, more than enough aircraftparking, no handling charges and we’reopen all day and night, every day. There’sno reason why GA shouldn’t be part of oursuccess.”It’s going to be interesting to see how

things pan out. Southend airport has itscommercial imperatives, but there has tobe a realisation that GA is one of thefoundation stones on which the wholeaviation industry rests, and it can’tsimply be left to someone else to sustainit. We will follow its progress withkeen interest. �

fallen away, and we expect that trend tocontinue.”For the moment the airport is running a

charm offensive with general aviation

26 General Aviation April 2012

Above: new control tower – built for StobartAir, project-managed by Stobart RailBelow: GA meets CAT as George Capon (left)and Jonathan Rayner talk business