Diverted flights question

[kevmul]

Not sure where else to ask this, but with the diversions from and to Liverpool this week, I thought I'd ask the question.

There may be an obvious answer to this but when a flight is diverted into Liverpool, are the passengers included in the number claimed for the month/year against Liverpool or do they still count towards their original destination airport?

As an example, we saw a number of flights diverted into Liverpool on Saturday evening. Are those passengers counted in our figures or against Manchester/Birmingham etc?

MTIA

Kev

[viscount]

Certainly when I was involved in using figures, in my early days of writing about Airport activity during the 1980s, the position was confusing and not easily clarified. At that time the CAA figures and those of the Airport/Airlines would often differ. This was partly as a result of how diverted passengers were counted, but also how transit passengers were treated in the figures.

Then it appeared that the CAA figures counted diverted passengers for the airport of intended arrival and transit passengers just once. However how the figures were counted and reported mattered in pre computer days, and certainly some airports were accused of, should I put it politely "maximising" the reported figures. Liverpool always reckoned they followed the rules closely. For their own purposes, Liverpool (if I recall correctly) counted diverted arriving and departing passengers, but not passengers lost to elsewhere, but I cannot recall now if transit passengers were counted once or twice, I think just once.

The need to be very careful about sources continues. Ryanair for example count for their published route load-factors all passengers booked and paid - regardless of whether they travelled or not. CAA figures are the number of passengers transported - even then I'm not sure if active staff eg crews being positioned around are counted or not, or what the current rules are on diverted and transit pax.

The mosted marked difference in figures I've encountered where in the early 80s when I have two very different sets of figures for LPL to IoM, by a factor of some 30-40%. This is because the IoM was the first stop on Manx's Belfast combined route, so passengers in transit through the IoM were being counted as being for the IoM! Just illustrates the pitfalls in handling pax stats.

I don't know if any members of the forum are involved in compiling traffic figures. it would be interesting to get an informed answer to Kelmul's question.