Talk:Air ferry

Expansion request

I just moved this from the article...

(Please expand, why are there no air ferries nowadays?)

IMHO - It's probably due to the extremely low cost of the channel tunnel and ferries versus the high cost associated with aviation fuel, and the fact that aviation security (and regulations) have been tightened since the 1950s. Megapixie 09:49, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I too would love to know more of the motivations for this. Cultural more than economic? From any economic perspective it seems completely insane. All those overheads & running costs just to transport twenty customers a day, I guess that kind of number is all each plane could manage daily. I know the costs were cheaper in those days - but even then a car hire firm at your destination would be SO much cheaper to operate! -Iain 87.194.241.226 (talk) 13:14, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

I also wondered about this after I saw the Lydd - Le Touquet air ferry on the Morecambe and Wise film That Riviera Touch. How on earth was this ever economically viable? Flying from an airfield in Kent to one in the Pas de Calais was surely much costlier than just taking the sea ferry, without all that much saving in time. PatGallacher (talk) 22:46, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Because this was prior to RoRo car ferries and so passengers who arrived early for the trip had to wait for the later arrival's cars to be loaded on board the ship by crane. So it was time that the new air ferries saved the traveller, in many cases, a whole morning or afternoon. If one was going away for a weekend break it made taking the car possible. And it wasn't just 'twenty customers a day' at the time BION, IIRC Lydd Ferryfield was as busy - perhaps busier - than London Heathrow. It was certainly one of the busiest airports in the UK.

As for the cost, the people who 'did' continental holidays then were not the same sort of people who do them now, this was before the cheap package holiday abroad became the popular thing it is today, and so the people who did take their car abroad were generally the ones who didn't mind paying a bit more for the time saved. At the time also it was before the 1973 oil crisis when petrol and avgas cost was measured in shillings a gallon (in 1954 115/145 grade avgas was 2 shillings and 9.d a gallon - about 14 new pence), so the air ferries fuel costs were not high for the time. For the Silver City Airways and later BUAF flights from Lydd one only had to turn up for a particular scheduled flight, hand over the car keys so the car could be driven aboard the aeroplane, then get aboard one self. Then when the other passengers were all aboard the plane took off and a short while later one got off in France. It had none of the hassle or time wasting that occurred with sailing by ship. Then there were the delays to the sea ferries caused by bad weather, which, in the main, did not affect the air ferries so much. In winter, sometimes a sea ferry might not be able to sail at all due to high seas, whereas the air ferry service would continue unaffected. So if you had planned anything to do in France with a time limit taking the sea ferry was probably not a wise move - you could end up wasting half a day peering out of a Folkestone or Dover window watching the rain and gales.

The air ferries died out by the early 1970s when RoRo car ferries had made the difference in time saved less important between the two services and in addition, the lower fares made possible by the lower turnaround times (more sailings per day) allowed people who could not afford the air ferries previously to instead take a trip abroad by sea ferry for the first time. So the customers changed, in the 1950s and 1960s for example, not everyone in the UK owned a car. By the early 1970s many more people did. I think that's what they would now call 'changing customer demographics'.

It also didn't help that the local road and rail infrastructure was more or less allowed to wither and die, Lydd used to be on the BR network - Lydd Town railway station - until Dr. Beeching closed it down sometime in the 1960s, and there still isn't a decent road link to the airport. It was OK getting-to and -from the airport when there was comparatively little traffic on the roads, but today no-one would want to make the tiring and annoying road journey necessary to get to Lydd from anywhere. This is all also true of Manston Airport today, probably of little use to anyone simply because there is no quick and cheap means of passengers getting there from anywhere else. But that was/is not the fault of the airport operators or airlines. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 11:45, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Competition also increased in the 1960s with the introduction of the cross channel Hovercraft service - which also took cars - by Seaspeed and Hoverlloyd and then by the 1990s, they and the sea car ferries in turn lost out to the Channel Tunnel which had by then opened. So the air ferries had their day for a brief period. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 09:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

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