BA have just opened up a MX facility at PIK, its possible that the airfield could continue without scheduled airline ops.
You mean again! PIK always had the cargo through the dark times but worth remembering on the passenger side it went like this :
1990 end of transatlantic gateway status, Northwest, Air Canada and some of the Worldways flights decamp to Glasgow. Worldways then go bust!
1991 Air Transat operate a season with the L1011 PIK-YYZ, when this ends in Sep, passenger services cease at PIK.
1992 *no scheduled or charter passenger services*
1993 Business Air launch PIK-JER on a Sat in the summer
1994 FR launch PIK-DUB and a good number of summer charters with operate on various UK and foreign sun carriers
1995 FR launch PIK-STN, ends in three weeks with me on the last flight (!)
also Caledonian base an A320 for four days a week all summer
In recent years, the traffic carried by various summer operators has been snapped up by FR meaning passenger traffic is almost entirely dependent on them. If they lose all pax traffic, PIK proved it can survive on cargo only once before, but that was in the days of BAe. As it is, I don't think passenger operations add much to the bottom line anyway but I don't think we should be too alarmist. Being run from Wellington was not the greatest commercial masterplan let's be honest. "Pure Dead Brilliant" anyone?
The best plan is for summer sun routes and then the bare minimum over the Scottish winter, as the market is intensely seasonal alas, always has been. The European city routes did OK but as expected moved to EDI with the bigger inbound tourist market.
However if Ryanair were to decamp up the M77, new markets could be targeted by PIK management (again, this is opinion) such as E-Jet or CRJ size operators for some of the stronger performing routes or some city routes with short break potential (Paris, Barcelona, Budapest etc) along with a tour operator or someone like Monarch for sunshine routes.
E-Jet or CRJ would not work without high volumes of premium passengers, something PIK has never enjoyed. PIK did have a good relationship with Airtours / MyTravel for a few years but again the temptation to consolidate at GLA meant it didn't last.