Well they can go to Inverness or Aberdeen and transfer. Subsidies are not required to help big business!

Happy to be proved wrong, but I don't think this was the case. Many of the passengers were heading offshore but were heading Wick to Aberdeen to start their rotation.

Personally I have no issues with subsidies being used on this route as I doubt much will go to line the pockets of big business, but rather help sustain one of the more remote parts of GB.

That sounds like you’ve never done the long drive north ! Aberdeen is probably a five to six hour drive at best along a succession of some of the worst A roads in the country. Inverness is a near three hour drive along half of those roads. Give it a try when lockdown rules allow and see if you feel the same way.

Well said Saabdriver1 ! Will be interesting to see who they can get to run these flights and interesting to see if the timings are more suitable for day return business work

Presumably AirTask, Eastern and Loganair are the likely PSO bidders...
Any other possible (non-random) candidates ?

Is this the first time that Wick airport will have used PSO to secure flights. Or has PSO been used before at this airport.

Don’t forget the alternatives: a four hour 20/20 minute train journey or an expensive Stagecoach service!

fjencl

I think so. It has always been disadvantaged due to it being on the “mainland” so not seen as being as worthy of a subsidy like the islands (or Campbeltown).

A local joke was “How do you increase tourism to Caithness? Sink the Ola”. (that was St. Ola, the ferry to Orkney!).

When I lived there Gill Air operated three times a day to Aberdeen, Mondays to Fridays.
Loganair flew to Lerwick, Kirkwall, Inverness, Glasgow and Edinburgh. None of it was subsidised.

LTNman

Correct me if i'm wrong, but weren't there flights in the past? Presumably these carried passengers, and so there was some demand. Perhaps not enough to make it profitable, but that's where the subsidies come in - making routes that were marginal before feasible.

The quoted PSO is £1m per year, or £2,700 per day. Assuming twice daily to EDI and GLA, then that works out at £342 per flight. That's not an insignificant sum, and will go a long way towards paying the operating costs of the flight. Another way of looking at it - at an average ticket price of £40 each way, then it's the equivalent of 8 extra passengers - more if you run a reduced service at weekends.

The truth is next to no one lives up there with a tiny population and an ever smaller one that would be prepared to fly. There gets to a point that the further south people live from Wick the more appealing Inverness becomes.

The population is around 24,000. Dounreay and Rolls Royce employ around 1300 people and used the flights heavily.
The journey to Inverness is over four hours by train and three by coach.
The population of Mull of Kintyre is less than 10,000 yet Campbeltown gets a PSO flight, when it is just over 3 hours by road to Scotland's largest city.

Is there a planned date for publishing some sort of RFP around the proposed PSO or (even better) a date when flights are expected to start ?
Looking at the recent press, it seems like there's a lot of grandstanding by politicians.... but very little in the way of publicly visible action

The pace is glacial.

From the John O' Groat JournalHighland Council has agreed to help fund the creation of a public service obligation for Wick John O'Groats Airport.

Councillor Nicola Sinclair, chair of the Caithness committee, welcomed the decision to earmark £300,000 towards the creation of the PSO.

It came as the local authority agreed its budget for the next financial year.

The money will add to the funding already secured from the Scottish and UK governments.

Councillor Nicola Sinclair said: “I am delighted to see Highland Council agree to fund the public service obligation for Wick John O’Groats Airport.

"We now have multiple funding partners in the form of the Highland Council, Scottish Government and UK government, and work continues in earnest to reinstate services from our airport and mitigate the economic damage caused by the grounding of flights.

Another month has passed with little in the way of observable outcome
Allowing for a minimum of 2 months from formally advertising an RFP to a bid submission deadline, plus maybe another month from bidding closing to allow for appraising bids, notifying a winner and allowing the winner to sign contracts and put aircraft and crew in place means we are talking mid July as the earliest possible flight start date

With summer 2021 likely to see a domestic tourism boom, there is a great opportunity to get the route off to a strong start with plenty of pax and support the economy of a rather remote region that could do with a bit of a boost. So why the PSO delay ? Is there a need for more cash somewhere ?

There may well be Scottish Government funding required. Since we're in the Scottish Parliament election campaign it's possible that there's some kind of purdah preventing things like this being announced during the campaign.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/sc...odies/pages/2/

"Decisions on matters of policy on which the next administration might wish to take a different view from the current administration are expected to be postponed until after the election, provided that such postponement would not be detrimental to Scotland's interest or wasteful of public resources."

" (even better) a date when flights are expected to start ?"

I really think there are a hundred more pressing issues right now than deciding on providing a service at public cost that will benefit remarkably few people.

I don't think they have all the funding in place yet. I think they hope to have the final amount of funding in place soon, however long that will be !

Does anyone have any stats on previous passenger movements from Wick?

From CAA staTs

2018 - ABZ 7,775, EDI 9,341
2019 - ABZ 5,317, EDI 7,395

thanks - a hundred or so people a week to and from both - seems a pretty small number to me