The short-lived international airport opened in 1997, but the last scheduled flight took off five years later and it officially closed in 2008 after reporting losses of over £ 1million.
Today, the Tinsley site, next to the M1, is a business park, with the old terminal and the air control tower transformed into offices.
His seven-minute video has been viewed over 200,000 times in a matter of days and generated over 300 comments from other aviation enthusiasts.
He describes how there had been plans for an airport in Sheffield since the late 1960s and after it opened it was served by KLM and British Airways, with over 75,000 passengers in 1999.
Despite a promising start, the investment quickly came to a halt, with the owners never installing radar installations and the short runway with little room for expansion limiting the number of planes that could fly there just as the low cost flight revolution was taking off.
“If you come here to Sheffield City Airport today, all you’ll come across is really wasteland, an industrial area and that’s about it,” says Philips.
“But if you look a little closer, there are still signs of what was once here.”
The video features drone footage showing how much of the old runway is nothing more than a strip of overgrown wasteland, but a small portion remains with the original markings still visible.
The airport fire station is now an industrial unit, the old heliports are part of the car park and the old hangars still have the old signage in place. A Boeing factory is located in the business park in what the vlogger says is a “really weird piece of bitter irony.”
“To see this once busy airport now used as offices is a real shame,” says Philips.
“Somehow the fact that so much of the airport is remembered makes it even sadder to see.”
After its closure, the airport was sold for just £ 1 to be turned into an industrial estate.
Today, the city is served by Doncaster Sheffield Airport, which opened in 2005 and in 2019, before the pandemic, handled 1.4 million passengers.
Despite Sheffield City Airport’s lack of success, a small group of activists lobbied for it to be reopened and in 2013 more than 5,500 people signed a petition to have the site back in service, but This was not the case.
In his video, Mr. Philips concludes that Sheffield City Airport was “the right idea, but at the wrong time”.
“The airport opened its doors just as the low-cost revolution was starting in the UK,” he says.
“Niche commercial operators that could operate from Sheffield were quickly out of fashion, and the airport was far too small and parked by the surrounding area to accommodate any expansion that would allow low cost operators such as Ryanair or Wizz Air to fly from here.
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Source: www.thestar.co.uk
This notice was published: 2021-06-25 10:36:38