Jet2 win legal challenge to keep airport open
09.12.10
Blackpool Airport suffered a High Court defeat at the hands of budget airline Jet2, after it tried to ban early morning and night flights, the Gazette reports. Jet2 has won an injunction forcing Blackpool Airport Ltd to ‘use its best endeavours’ to accommodate flights outside its normal operating hours. Judge, Mr Justice Beatson, said Jet2 had a, ‘strong arguable case,’ that banning flights before 07:00 and after 21:00 would amount to a breach of contract.
The dispute came to a head when the airport announced that, as from midnight on October 29 (when the winter flights season launched), it would not accept flight departures or arrivals outside those hours in the winter, and between 06:00 and 20:00 in the summer. As a result, two Jet2 flights due to arrive after 21:00 on October 30 and October 31, from Faro and Alicante, had to be diverted to Manchester and over 300 passengers were ‘bussed’ back to Blackpool Airport, the High Court in London heard.
The airport, 95% owned by Balfour Beatty, had asked Jet2 to increase its departing passenger numbers by 120,000 in 2011 and said that, unless profitability improved, it would have to ‘re-gauge the airport's operations’, including cutting back on radar and air traffic control facilities and ‘strictly enforcing’ its operating hours.
The airport's barrister, Michael Crane QC, argued it could not be obliged ‘to remain open and operational continuously so as to accommodate the airline's flights at whatever hours the airline sees fit to schedule.’ He said the airline had made ‘veiled and less-veiled threats’ to pull out unless the airport increased its marketing budget, and argued flights outside normal operating hours had only been allowed on the understanding that Jet2 would increase its passengers.
But Philip Shepherd QC, for Jet2, said Blackpool had in 2006 promised to ‘use its best endeavours’ to promote the airline's services and restricting its hours of operation struck at the heart of the airport's contractual obligations.
Extending an injunction granted last month, Mr Justice Beatson said Jet2 was not demanding that the hub remain open 24 hours a day, only that it ‘do its best to accommodate’ its flight movements at all times. The judge ruled: ‘This is a case in which granting the relief sought (an injunction) would preserve a 'dynamic status quo'
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