Plain planes and main trains in the rain. No, not in Spain, but in Mainchester! Or something to that effect. :P

As you may have gathered by now, my observant viewer, the theme of this week’s posts is aviation. I’ve had flight on my mind quite a bit as of late as I prepare to head for Furnal Equinox in Toronto, but also because of recent reports about the viability of Wales’s main international airport, at Cardiff. Well, technically at Rhoose, a small village about 13 miles to the southwest of the capital.

Of course, it isn’t uncommon in Europe for large commercial airports to be located far outside of city centres. After all, Rhoose is as far away from Cardiff as Heathrow is from Westminster, and Gatwick being over twice that distance away at 27 miles. In order to compensate for that, it is essential for these airports to have convenient, cheap, high-speed services to get from the airport to the city centre and vice versa, making the airports viable not just for business interests, but also for travellers who want to spend more time exploring their holiday destination than the duty free. Take Manchester, pictured here, as an example. The airplane you see on final into Manchester airport will dock at one of the three terminals, from which you can get a modern train straight into Manchester Piccadilly station, and then be on another modern train to Stockport over the bridge pictured in about 40 minutes. Not only that, but running on all sides of the airport are main highways, capable of getting one to many parts of the country, and capable of bringing people from across the United Kingdom to flights departing around the world.

Now let’s look at Cardiff. You can get a rickety shuttle bus from the 1990s to take you to a small train station, where a rattling train from the 1980s trundles you to Barry, and then into the centre of Cardiff in about an hour. Alternatively, you can get the bus along the small country roads of the Vale of Glamorgan to get you into the middle of Cardiff in about 45 minutes. That’s it. What a welcome that must be to visitors from around the globe, to be shipped into the Welsh capital on a crowded commuter train built from the frame of a bus. Bristol is in a similar situation, but that doesn’t even have the nearby train link, and so in a situation where both Bristol and Cardiff airports are operated by the same company, there are no prizes for guessing which airport has received the most funding. 8.7 million passengers in 2018 will trump 1.5 million every time.

Hope you enjoy!