Plymouth (UK) airport will never re-open - Term Paper Example

However, this trend did not last long after 2009 (Great Britain 2010, p. 101). The airport was eventually officially closed on the 23rd of December 2011 after the owners coming to an agreement that this was the right decision to make at that particular moment. There are a number of reasons that are believed to have led to the closure of Plymouth City Airport. According to the management of the airport, closure was made inevitable due to the economic downturn and the problems that the UK aviation market was facing at that time.

Just 6 months before the airport was closed the company had registered a loss of up to £1m (Hynes 2010, p. 201). This was a simple sign that the airport was not going to do well under the same condition given the fact that the airport had more than 50 employees. If they decided to remain functional, they would have continued incurring losses because they would still have operational costs, compensation of their employees being included. The situation at Plymouth Airport was made worse by the withdrawal of Air South West’s flights to London.

This meant that the airport no longer had any London passengers going through it. This was a big blow to the airport. The management tried all they could to find a replacement for Air South West, but they were not successful. This led to a situation whereby less than 100 passengers were flying from this airport every day. This was a simple implication that the airport was no longer commercially viable. Much of the services that were offered did not earn the airport any profits due to the situation that had developed as a result of the withdrawal of Air South West, the economic turn-down, and the problems that the UK aviation industry was facing at that time (Pavlyuk 2014, p. 22). This can be explained by the fact that by the month of April 2011, Sutton Harbour Holdings had already announced that the airport would be closed down by the end of 2011.

In fact, the