An airport on your doorstep
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The day of departure is looming. Your flight’s booked. Your hotel’s booked. You’ve got a mental checklist of things to pack. You’ve got a great deal on a rental car using one of those car hire comparison websites. You’ve even had a word with the neighbours to look out for anything dodgy while you’re away.
The only cloud on the horizon is the ‘airport experience’ itself. If you’re flying from any of the UK’s major airports, chances are your day will start with a traffic hold-up and get progressively worse (airport parking aside, hopefully!) In fact, it has been estimated that for any destination to which the flying time is under three and half hours – that’s London to Marrakech, for instance – the greater proportion of your journey will be spent waiting for things to happen. Any flying time longer than that and you’ll start to spend more time airborne than you do standing in line on the ground.
How much faster and simpler it would be if you could fly from a smaller airport. One that’s closer to home, where the only two-storey building is the control tower and where you can walk from the car park to the aircraft steps, pausing only to hand your bags to the uniformed attendant.
There are literally hundreds of small airports dotted around the UK. Regrettably, few of them are capable of handling today’s large passengers jets. Many of them are little more than nicely mowed fields with a shed at the end. More accurately they’d be called airfields rather than airports.
One of the country’s smallest commercial airports is at Barra, an island in the Outer Hebrides. If you lived in Barra the airport would be virtually on your doorstep, although in truth most things in Barra would be virtually on your doorstep. Flights to and from Barra are governed by tide tables because the runway is basically the beach. It gets washed by the sea twice a day. Airport terminal facilities include seats, tables, hot and cold beverages and a pay phone. Joking aside, Barra is probably the UK’s most romantic and beautiful airport.
There are plenty of little-known commercial airports close to the major conurbations, too. Just 12 miles from the centre of London, for example, sits London Biggin Hill Airport. (At the last count, there were six ‘official’ London airports, at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, Biggin Hill and Oxford. Southend is keen to join them, despite being 45 miles away.) Add the smaller grass-and-windsock places and there are nearly 40 aerodromes and heliports in the south-east alone.
Perhaps the most often-seen small airport in the UK is Dunsfold Airfield in Surrey. Although rather than witnessing Boeings, Airbuses or even Cessnas land here, you’re more likely to see Ferraris, Masaratis and Bentleys race around its perimeter track. Oh, and the odd star in a reasonably priced car. That’s right – it’s where BBC’s Top Gear is filmed.
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