Advertising
For help, call:
Some UK airports are having great success: Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Stansted all bounced back strongly from the Covid pandemic. The UK’s busiest airport, Heathrow, received a record number of passengers in February – an average of 200,000 per day.
However, some small airports in the UK don’t even have 200,000 passengers a year. Many depend on public subsidies to survive, for social and economic reasons. Highlands and Islands Airports, which operates 11 airports in Scotland, won £56 million in grants last year. a whopping £40 for each passenger who used their facilities.
Other airports are just as lucky. Six English airports have closed in this century, the most recent being Doncaster Sheffield. Sixteen months after the departure of the last passengers, South Yorkshire Airport is the subject of a rescue operation.
So which airports are burned out and which could simply be reactivated?Here are the key questions and answers.
Flights to South Yorkshire’s main airport began in 1998 with domestic routes to the City of London, Belfast City and Jersey, as well as overseas routes to Amsterdam, Brussels and Dublin. These routes were cancelled, and the last flights to and from Belfast city took up position in August 2002.
Could it be reopened? It is now part of the Sheffield Business Park.
That’s strange. Baginton airfield, southeast of Coventry, has been in operation since 1936. In 2004, the giant excursion operator Tui created a new cheap airline, Thomsonfly, in Coventry and bought the airport.
The concept was that operating from the airport itself would be less expensive and less difficult than Birmingham (13 miles to the west) or East Midlands (33 miles to the north).
Amenities included a mix of transitional buildings. Thomsonfly, a belated and failed reaction to the good fortunes of easyJet and Ryanair, took off and over the next 4 years Coventry developed a network aimed at the Mediterranean. Even Wizz Air arrived with flights to Gdansk and Katowice. But in 2008, after the High Court rejected plans to build a permanent terminal and Thomsonfly disappeared permanently.
Tui now has a thriving presence at Birmingham Airport, now taking on the easyJet festival as well as Ryanair and Jet2.
Could it be reopened? Coventry Airport continues to operate as a general aviation airfield for small aircraft. There are no plans to revive trade.
The airport, located north of the city center, opened in 1925. Like many smaller airports, it abandoned through British Airways when domestic routes were disrupted. The only time I used it, in 2004, I reveled in silence, with only nine passengers on my plane. Flight from Southwest to Gatwick (179 miles away) via Newquay (39 miles away). Other routes served Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Jersey and Cardiff, just 75 miles apart by air, but more than twice as far by road or rail. In 2011, the airport closed.
Could it be reopened? Definitely, according to Plymouth City Council leader Tudor Evans. Last month, he said: “We are a great city, we have the ambition to grow and prosper and an airport has to be of that history. “
What can go wrong? The former RAF Manston is located on the north-eastern tip of Kent, on the Isle of Thanet. This gives Manston Airport a big advantage: Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Amsterdam are at least 20 minutes closer to Manston than Heathrow. A little-frequented airport at Kent Tip, 66 miles from central London, avoids traffic jams on the ground and in the skies of London, the world’s busiest air traffic zone.
Access from the capital to the M2 and the A299 (continuation of the motorway to Thanet) is easy. Thanks to the HS1 rail line, Ramsgate station is just 79 minutes from London St Pancras and the airport is around five minutes away.
Still, repeated attempts to offer regular flights from Manston have failed. In September 2004, I boarded the first EUjet flight, bound for Dublin; The following July, the airline went bankrupt. Since then, Flybe hasn’t sunk twice. But before doing so, the regional airline cancelled its routes between Manston and Edinburgh and Belfast.
KLM’s management in Amsterdam took off from Manston, but not financially. Manston’s last scheduled flight departed for the Dutch capital on April 9, 2014. Since then, the airport has had a lucrative activity as a reserve parking lot for trucks on the occasion of Brexit-related traffic chaos in Kent.
Could it be reopened? Yes, according to RiverOak Strategic Partners, whose purpose is to “revive Manston Airport as a cost-effective, high-performance air shipping hub of national significance, with complementary passenger and engineering services. “
2014 is not an ideal year for small airports in the UK. When Manston closed its doors, Blackpool Airport on the Lancashire coast was suffering in terms of scheduled flights. Squire’s Gate Airport has had an attractive history. Over the years, there have been many directions, adding a common address between Ryanair and Stansted, a charter flight programme from Tui to the Mediterranean and a propeller aircraft address to Biggin Hill airfield on the London-Kent border. The re-establishment of direct trains from Blackpool to London seems to have sounded the death knell. The last passenger flights departed in October 2015.
Could it be reopened? Blackpool is open and thriving for general aviation and business flights. In 2022, it received more flights than Teesside, Leeds, Bradford, Bournemouth, and Southampton. But the forecast for more passenger flights, with Manchester Airport just 85 minutes away by direct train, looks bleak.
RAF Finningley, six miles from Doncaster and 19 miles from Sheffield, closed in 1995. A decade later, it reopened as Robin Hood Airport, and Tui was once again a strong supporter of a new, cheap starting point for British tourists. But Doncaster Sheffield has 4 competing airports within an hour’s drive. It is 28 miles from Humberside, 38 miles from Leeds Bradford, 46 miles from the East Midlands and 53 miles from Manchester. DSA, as it came to be, closed its doors in 2022. The owner, Peel Group, said at the time: “No tangible proposals have been obtained relating to the ownership of the airport or addressing the basic lack of monetary viability. “Promises made by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss to “protect this airport and its infrastructure” did not work. The last flights landed in November 2022.
Could it be reopened? Doncaster Mayor Ros Jones of the Labour Party has signed an agreement for the local council to take over the airport. But it’s unclear which airport operator might be interested in operating DSA, or which airlines might provide service there.
Each of the UK’s countries has an airport that is kept afloat by hefty subsidies.
This charming airport, southwest of Glasgow, is famous for being the only British soil on which Elvis Presley set foot – a refueling site for a U. S. military flight between Germany and the United States. For decades, Prestwick has been a leading transatlantic airport, with British Airways. But its location on the beautiful Ayrshire coast is tricky for many Scots, and the roads have been gradually eroding. In October 1995, Ryanair took the groundbreaking decision to open a new national address in Great Britain, from Prestwick to London. Stansted, for £19. Ryanair remains the only advertising operator in Prestwick, regularly flying two or three flights a day. The Scottish Government owns Prestwick, and “the long-term objective of Ministers remains to return Prestwick Airport to the personal sector as soon as the opportunity arises. “
The airport, whose station only received two trains a week, was in dire straits when Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen returned it to public ownership and then allowed Peel Holdings to flatten the site and build housing. Teesside was the first airport in the UK to remove the 100ml liquid limit in hand baggage. Apart from that, the biggest draw is the twice-daily connection to Amsterdam and occasional Ryanair flights. Last year, the airport lost £2. 26 million, or exactly £10 per passenger.
Over the past two decades, passenger numbers at Cardiff have fallen by around half, while Bristol Airport now handles around double that in the same time period. The capital’s airport, southwest of the city, is struggling to bring back passengers. at pre-pandemic levels. While almost all UK airports saw an expansion in 2023 compared to the previous year, the latest figures from the Civil Aviation Authority show a slight decline at Cardiff, with just 837,000 passengers at the airport.
Losses amounted to £4. 5 million in the year to March 2023, with the Welsh Government offering a grant of £5. 3 million.
‘CoDA’ is a very good gateway to the city of Derry/Londonderry as well as County Donegal in the republic. But as Northern Ireland’s third-largest airport, after Belfast International and George Best Belfast City, it has faced challenges. Keeping the airport in operation costs more than £3 million a year, and the council is looking for further investment from Stormont.
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising