In 1998 the new Sheffield City Airport opened to provide fast convenient travel for the four million people within a forty minute drive … opening up a gateway to Europe for businesses in Sheffield … instead of going elsewhere .. they will want to fly from Sheffield. [to quote the airport’s PR from the time]. Things started out well but then passenger numbers declined – after peaking at 75,000 – and the last scheduled flight left in 2002. With Sheffield City Council quoting losses of £400,000 a year it closed completely in 2008.
The lease on this £1 million, 80 acre site allowed for the transfer of ownership at a nominal £1 if the airport was not financially viable after 10 years. So the leaseholder could simply let the airport wither on the vine. The ten years were up in 2008. Now five years on from the closure there are still groups trying to stop the airport being built over – but in reality not enough of those four million people need to travel on short-haul or business flights from Sheffield. Grandad predicts that Sheffield’s planned HS2 railway station awaits a similar fate when (if) the new tracks get built.
But still the nearby Doncaster-Sheffield Airport would seem like a better prospect. Mainly because its huge runway lacks the aircraft restrictions imposed by Sheffield City’s limited space. It opened in 2005 so had little impact on the demise of Sheffield City. And at Doncaster-Sheffield passenger numbers topped 1 million per year by 2007. However the airport can handle around 2.5 million passengers per year and numbers had fallen back to 700,000 by 2012. Next month work is due to start to provide the missing link road from the M18 motorway. But sadly the planned new road stops short of the airport’s own access road by just over a kilometre! So the drive times will not improve by as much as was hoped.
Even with a better road Doncaster-Sheffield will still lack enough (any) scheduled flights to European business centres and have no internal, short-haul flights to London or the major UK cities. If the region really did need high speed travel to London or Birmingham, to boost the local economy and create jobs, then it could have it now by air – rather than in 20 years time by rail.