Hurrah! Here's something you won't be seeing over the Millionaires' Playground again. Well-known Canada and Nigeria-crashers MK Airlines, who have spent most of the last year blighting our lovely seaside town with their endless, oozalum training flights and 1am cargo cruises, have gone tits up! They're apparently parked up in Oostende (Ostend in old money) awaiting the receivers as we speak. What with them and those other blighters, Oasis Hong Kong Airlines, going to that great airport in the, um, sky it looks like we've finally seen the last of knackered old jumbos blasting the tiles off our splendid Victorian roofs every 8 minutes!Given worldwide carbon footprint anxiety, new aviation taxes, airlines dropping like an MK 747 and the price of fuel going up faster than a porn star's whatsit, you have to ask whether RAF London Kent Ramsgate Manston International Airport can hold out much longer. The development of Summit Aviation's maintenance centre up there has already stalled. Surely it can't be long before the whole place crashes and burns?
As regular readers will recall, I'm well known for my infallible crystal ball, and my prediction is we'll see Infartil, the airport's owners, pull out at some point in the next 6-12 months. Which leaves the question of what we do with Manston. Wind farm? Housing estate? If Thanet had a council with any vision, they'd be lobbying Tussauds or Disney as we speak to locate a fabulous theme park on the site. What with that, our beautiful sandy beaches, and our proximity to London, we'd have it made! I fear though that, as we in fact have a council with about as much vision as my glass eye, what we'll get is an even bigger, water-polluting Chinese industrial estate!
Click here for MK announcement on NASDAQ
Click here for MK obituary in Wikipedia
Click here for list of all
17 comments:
With the govt today offering JOBS! and MONEY! to councils to bury nuclear waste in their back yards how long before Latchford and co go up to town to brown nose Hillary Benn with a plan for Manston? No matter that it would be buried somewhere in our water supply. Better to be poisoned by good old fashioned British radioactivity for a million years than Chinese pollution eh? Or how about we have both? That should really get their G spots going!
So why do we have an hotel on the Prospect site and planning requested for another one by Whitbread on the other side of the road near Somerfield's ? Somebody must be expecting something to happen close by !! C'mon Richard tell us what's happening; is it all for the development that hasn't even been given permission yet ?? Can all those people afford to stay in these hotels while more permanent accommodation is being built ?
Not forgetting the run-off from battery toms and cucumbers. We will soon be able to bottle our tap water and sell it on as paint stripper LOL
Ron this may interest you
So what has the EA done since this letter was sent out two years ago? Is the bulk fuel installation still rotting away above our water supply? I think we should be told.
Isn't it amazing the way that regulatory bodies pounce on individuals from a great height but consistently fail to adress major shortcomings when they have to take on bigger concerns? I wonder why.....
You are an evil man Mr Eastcliff and I pray for your soul every evening. The Good Lord has blessed us with wonderful pilots here on our beautiful island as witnessed by the brave acts of heroism they perform each day. I will be personally intervening with His Holiness and asking him to canonise all of them at the earliest opportunity.
I was shopping at Asda tonight and tried to buy Kent apples.
The apples were from South Africa, New Zealand and Argentina, oh and some from France. The folly of cargo flight of food from abroad is mad and the sooner it ends the better. MK will join a long line of airlines that will go bust this year as we return to buyng seasonal and local
could not agree more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/11/greenbuilding.food
Thanks for the link to the Guardian's recent post about Thanet Earth, anon 9.28am.
6.28 yes it is still rotting away above the water supply, I think it probable that with all the airlines that have gone bust owing the airport money, they probably can’t afford to comply with the discharge consent. It’s odd really that on the one hand millions will be spent on reservoirs in other parts of the area while our own is being treated with such contempt.
I don't get it. Two years ago the EA said that the bulk fuel installation posed an "unacceptable risk" to our water supply. They wanted a plan for decommissioning it within three months. They point out that they have legal powers to force this to happen. Two years on and nothing has been done. Why is the EA sitting on its hands?
I don't get it either? The EA have evidently served a section 10 notice, whatever that is, on the owner's. Anyone out there know what a section 10 is?
And how come the press haven't latched onto this. They were quick enough to jump all over the China Gateway thing but this sounds a lot more serious. Presumably it's because the fuel tank is to do with the airport and the local press refuse to print anything negative about the airport. Anyone know why they're so biased?
Where's Steve? I would have have thought he'd be wetting his pants with joy, like yourself ECR, at the downfall of another airline.
I've had to don an extra pair of incontinence pants Tony, I'm that excited!
hello tony
Not crowing, wetting pants, anything. Fuel/credit crisis will hurt us all in some way. It shouldn't be this stopping an airline/airport from operating, but the council making the most of their brownfiled sites and canning the airport for something with a future.
If anything, this will leave a derelict airfield in Thanet for another 20 years while our beloved council finds some other operator to schedule 40 passenger flights for a year.
The time to cash in here was when the RAF left, not 2 owners and 100 bust airlines later.
Hawk jets were buzzing the tower at high speed today - I would love for it to still be an airbase, i really would.
Genuinely feel sorry for anyone in that industry at the moment, but times are a changing.
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