after it was stolen from the council tax payer.
It wasn't stolen. It was bought for £1, with a whole load of clauses attached. So if someone buys a house for £1, spends a huge amount of time and effort doing it up, and then sells it on for a profit a thief too?
Hopefully one day there might be some money around to get it going again
Business doesn't work on hopefully and one day. Either there is a business case to do something, in which case someone can give it a go, or there isn't. Even in the case of the former, having a business case and executing it are two different things.
It would be of great benefit to the Advanced Manufacturing Park which is developing apace across the road.
Airports don't develop for the sake of a few industrial units. For routes to succeed, they need volume, and they also need that volume to generate the right yields. If a very large bank was moving its whole operations to Sheffield, then it might be slightly different.
- there's a rail line right next to it so it would be easy to add to the tram network.
No it wouldn't. Rail systems are far more than just a case of linking bits of metal. You need to ensure system compatibility and, like the airport itself, you need a business case.
Firstly, branch lines into airports tend to get built when the airport hits somewhere around the 5-20m pax pa mark, clearly well outside the scope of what's been talked about.
Secondly, even if the airport was busy enough, you'd have to take a branch of at Carbrook, thus watering down the service to Meadowhall. Now let's work this one out - serve a thriving (albeit horrid) shopping centre or a tiny airport?
More to the point, rail is the biggest reason why the airport isn't going to work here. The most important destination regional airports want is London, but London is just too close. PLH nose dived when it lost the LGW route. For all their flaws, trains started from 3 hours PLH-Paddington.
Sheffield to London trains aren't the best either - they are no quicker than Manchester or Leeds to London, but you do have an hourly headway on the faster services, and overall two trains per hour.
So the plane can't win on overall journey time or frequency to London, and this isn't a loco facility so you can't take the trains on over cost either.
So I'm with groundloop on this one.