Sheffield City Airport & Heliport

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Sheffield City Airport
IATA: SZD - ICAO: EGSY
Summary
Airport type		Public
Operator		Peel Airports
Serves		Sheffield
Elevation AMSL		231 ft (70 m)
Coordinates		52°23′39″N, 01°23′19″W
Runways
Direction	Length		Surface
Direction	ft	m	Surface
10/28	3,972	1,211	Asphalt

Sheffield City Airport (IATA: SZD, ICAO: EGSY) is a small airport located in Sheffield. It is located in the district of Tinsley near the M1 motorway and Sheffield Parkway and opened in 1997. The airport is now set to close as Sheffield City Council has approved plans to turn the airport into a business park. ^[1]

[edit] History

Before it opened, Sheffield was the largest city in Europe without its own airport, having decided not to develop an airport in the 1960s due to the relative speed and reliability of its rail link with London at that time.

The airport was built on a short-runway STOLPORT model similar to London City. It offered flights to Belfast, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Jersey and London with the airlines KLM, Sabena, British Airways and Aer Arann. It was this choice of the city airport model, coming immediately before the meteoric rise of the low cost airline in the UK, that condemned the airport from the start: Sheffield arguably did not have enough commerce to support the sort of high-fare short-hop business flight that could use the airport, while aircraft types used by the new low-cost airlines, for which there is much demand in the Sheffield area, could not use the airport due to the length of its runway. It also suffered from the intractable problem of not having enough traffic to justify investing in a radar, while many airlines were refusing to operate into the airport due to its lack of radar.

In the end the last scheduled airline pulled out in 2002, after the airport had passed into the hands of Peel Airports, who were shortly to be opening the nearby Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield airport.

[edit] Current status

The airport still exists as a General Aviation aerodrome. However, its future is now in serious doubt since a report commissioned by the City Council revealed it was losing £400,000 a year and is unlikely to be sustainable in the near future. [1]

In the near future the runway will be shortened to less than a third of its current length and the airport will be turned into a heliport, with the old runway being used for office development. [2]