| Sheffield City Heliport | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| IATA: |
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| Summary | |||
| Airport type | Public | ||
| Owner | Peel Airports and Heliports | ||
| Operator | Sheffield City Heliport Services | ||
| Serves | Sheffield | ||
| Location | Sheffield Parkway | ||
| Elevation AMSL | 231 ft / 70 m | ||
| Coordinates | |||
| Website | |||
| Map | |||
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EGSY
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| Runways | |||
| Direction | Length | Surface | |
| m | ft | ||
Sheffield City Airport (IATA: SZD, ICAO: EGSY) was a small airport located in Sheffield that is now closed. It was located in the Tinsley Park area of the city, near the M1 motorway and Sheffield Parkway, and opened in 1997. The airport had its CAA licence withdrawn on 21 April 2008 and officially closed on 30 April 2008, as Sheffield City Council had approved plans to turn the airport into a business park.[1]
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Before it opened, Sheffield was the largest city in Europe without its own airport although there was a proposal made in 1968 to build an airport on land near Todwick in Rotherham but came to nothing. The lack of an airport in Sheffield was (is) due primarily to the fact there is only a limited area of flat land large enough for it. In fact the size of the airport which was eventually built was determined by this geographical factor.[2] It is not coincidental that Sheffield is built on hills because the resultant rivers powered the development of its most famous industries, namely steel making and engineering.
The airport was built, after a consultants report, on a short-runway STOLPORT model similar to London City Airport. It offered flights to Belfast, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Jersey and London with the airlines KLMuk, Sabena, British Airways and Aer Arann. The Amsterdam service was described by KLMuk as the best start-up they had ever experienced. It has been argued that 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 flights 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, it is alleged, 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. By the time the last scheduled service was flown, the terminal interior had been converted to office accommodation. Fire and rescue cover and air traffic control staffing levels were both reduced and published procedures for instrument approaches were withdrawn, rendering the airport unattractive to the current generation of airlines which offer low-cost services with turboprop aircraft.
There has been a degree of controversy over whether there was any incentive for Peel to promote the airport. The original lease between the SDC and Tinsley Park Ltd included a reversionary clause permitting the acquisition of 80 acres (320,000 m2) of land for £1 providing, after 10 years of opening, it could be shown that the airport was financially not viable. The development is being marketed at up to £220 per square foot. The estimated worth of a business park, which is now planned, being at least £1,000,000.[3][4]
An assessment commissioned by the City Council revealed it was losing £400,000 a year and was not sustainable.[5] On 21 April 2008, the airport's CAA licence was withdrawn. The airport closed completely on 30 April 2008.[6]
The runway, as a part of the 80 acres (320,000 m2), has been sold and will be developed into the Blue Skies Business Park. A heliport at the east end of the site will stay open for use by the South Yorkshire Police helicopter and the Yorkshire Air Ambulance helicopter, both of which are based at Sheffield, but will not be available for use by other aircraft.
The airport was built as part of a plan by the Sheffield Development Corporation to regenerate a very rundown old industrial area and to reclaim the land, which had previously been mined (coal) and was the site of derelict steelworks and waste tips. The opencast coal works were undertaken by R. J. Budge, who then planned to build the airport and business park once the site was reclaimed. The project was delayed part way through when Budge went into liquidation. The site was owned by the Sheffield Development Corporation until its demise when the asset was transferred, for no cost, to Sheffield City Council. As part of the scheme the link road was built, initially to take the coal lorries straight to the Sheffield Parkway and out to the M1. Following the completion of coal extraction and the reinstatement of the land, the link road was completed through to Tinsley. This allowed work to commence on the business park that was part of the 42 acres (170,000 m2) of land that the SDC had given to the airport's developers. The road was funded by the EU and was essential to the original plan to reclaim the land. The site is between Tinsley Golf Course, the Sheffield Parkway, Tinsley Marshalling Yards and British Steel's Tinsley rolling mill. Following the financial problems of Tinsley Park Ltd, Peel Holdings bought into the airport and business park for an unknown sum.