Conservative-Independent led Cornwall Council said it was "extremely disappointed" by the decision to end the service, which has offered as many as 40 flights a day and is thought to be used by up to 130,000 people a year.
Well, seems like the Conwall locals don't know the latest passenger number for the two carriers. In 2011 BIH flew 81,120 passengers and the Scilly Skybus 58,899 passengers. I don't know if all passengers to both carriers flew to/from the Scilly Isles, but combined we are talking about 140,019 passengers. Had all this traffic been flown with Dash-8-100s as I have suggested earlier in this thread, this would have equaled to 3,590 fully filled flights with a 39 seat Dash-8-100 and that again equals to five return flights per day. Since you can't fill the aircraft to the top all the time, this would with a more normal load correspond to an average of eight or nine return flights per day to the main land.
The St. Just Land's End Airport will be difficult to use for such a type of operation. The Dash-8 don't like grass fields and the longest runway (16/34) there is only 792 metres long. An in addition to that I might also say the airport is in the middle of nowhere. The purpose of these flights are to connect the Scilly Isles to the rest of the world, and then flying mainly to Newquay. This is 110 km/68 miles flight and a corresponding flight distance made by Widerĝe with a Dash-8-100 give a scheduled flight time of 25 minutes. In other words a Dash-8-100 can fly a return ISC-NQY in 90 minutes included turnarounds at both ends. From this only one Dash-8-100 is needed to cover these flight if the eight round trips would have been the case all year around. But I suspect we are mare talking 10-12 daily round trips in the Summer and 5-6 daily round trips during the Winter, then a second Dash-8-100 would be needed to cover the peak season. With two Dash-8s the Scillians could also fly further afield than Newquay to airports like Exeter (to link up with flybe) or to Bristol and in addition have spare capacity enough to cover for maintenance that can be performed during the Winter months.
In other words two Dash-8-100 can replace the existing fleet used to serve the Scilly Isles - 5x S-61N at BIH and 3x Twin Otter and 3x BN Islander at Skybus. The only problem now to solve is to do something to the airport at St Marys since today's runway can't be used for Dash-8-100s.
Here we go - a new runway turned more in accordance to windrose at ISC can be built. The runway above is 1,000 metre long and 30 metre wide (same measurements at the larger Norwegian STOLports). I know about the seven Scillonian entrance graves at Porth Hellick Down, and I have tried to avoid them all. The inlet to the Porth Hellick don't need to suffer since it is possible to build a concret bridge construction over the inlet for the runway and safety zones in stead of dam construction that had blocked off the whole bay from the sea. Existing terminal facilities can be use, the apron may have to be extended to make place for the larger Dash-8 and existing runways can be converted to taxiways. The length of the new runway (06/24 ish) to the east of the crossing with the existing 14/32 runway exceeds 600 metre, and this part can be used during closure of the old runway and link up the two ends of the new runway. This means the drainage problems the old runway has can be taken care of in the same process without interrupting the normal traffic.
The new runway will cost a lot of money, and I guess the Right Honourable MP from Brentwood and Ongar, Eric Pickles (Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government) will be helpful with funding this regional development that may lead to not needing to classify the flights and ferry operation a PSO (
Public service obligation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). To make the new runway even more reliable for the Scillian population, EP may even take a closer look at this
Widerĝe shoots world's first approved precision GPS approach