Re: Re: Cork Transport

It’s not so much whether a plane can take off and land (AFAIK the only one that can’t is an A380), it’s what you can have on it. You can certainly get 747s out of Cork. They’ve been used for rugby charters before and there was a KLM one ended up in Cork after a mid-Atlantic emergency.

The problem is that to get a 747 off the runway in Cork, you need to lose passengers, freight or fuel. If you take one of the first two off, you lose revenue. If you take the last off, you restrict your range.

The largest aircraft that can currently fly completely unrestricted from Cork is a 767-200. The A330-200 can take off from Cork with a full compliment of passengers and freight and enough fuel to get to the East Coast of the USA. Extending the runway would probably allow larger variants of the 767 and A330 (and presumably, the future 787 and A350) to use Cork Airport with fewer restrictions. It’s not really worth worrying about aircraft that are bigger than that anyway,