It’s hard to visualise what “2 million passengers a year” actually means in terms of actual disruption for local residents. However, there’s actually an easy way to find out – look at the Arrivals and Departures boards at Southampton Airport, which already has nearly 2 million passengers a year and is the role model for Southend’s expansion.

Fortunately for us, they put these on the front page of their website. The screenshots below were taken on the morning of 2nd March 2009 and show that between 10 and 11am there were 12 flights scheduled to take off or land, which means a plane every five minutes.

We have also been supplied with the total flight numbers at Southampton Airport on 3rd April broken down by hour. Note that this excludes private flights, so the numbers are actually higher than this.

	Arrivals	Departures	Total flights	Flight interval
0600-0700	0	3	3	20 mins
0700-0800	2	9	11	5.45 mins
0800-0900	10	8	18	3.33 mins
0900-1000	2	2	4	15 mins
1000-1100	5	6	11	5.45 mins
1100-1200	2	3	5	12 mins
1200-1300	0	3	3	20 mins
1300-1400	2	0	2	30 mins
1400-1500	8	8	16	3.75 mins
1500-1600	6	7	13	4.62 mins
1600-1700	6	4	10	6 mins
1700-1800	5	5	10	6 mins
1800-1900	6	5	11	5.45 mins
1900-2000	7	8	15	4 mins
2000-2100	1	4	5	12 mins
2100-2200	6	0	6	10 mins
2200-2300	1	0	1	60 mins
TOTAL	69	75	144	7.5 mins during operating hours