If you only ever measure an airport's purpose and therefore its success by the number of commercial air transport flights it attracts you will eventually paint yourself into a corner.
The Scottish Government was offered an approach to this research project that focused on the potential for developing Dundee's GA activity but seems to have rejected that in favour of yet another analysis focusing on pie-in-the-sky commercial route development.
Dundee has had 3-4000 ATMs a year for much of the last ten years. But its total movements have been pretty consistently 30-40,000 a year for more than ten years. Why build an entire subsidy system to make a handful of Dundee businessmen feel important, when the airport's real success story is the contribution it makes to commercial pilot training and to some extent military training through the cadets contract?
Airports like Dundee will never make money in their own right. That's why they were always in public hands until the Hayekian zealots warped our minds in the 1980s. Dundee's just lucky that it remained in public ownership throughout that period and hopefully will stay that way.
NS