Sheffield City Airport
Sheffield is one of the largest cities in Europe without a major airport.
It did have one, called Sheffield City Airport, and for a time just after it opened in 1996, it was reasonably successful. But it closed a couple of years ago and now it is being turned into a business park.
The reasons it closed was because it was designed to take limited short take-off and landing aircraft like London City. But unlike that airport, it couldn’t sustain the high value traffic that airports like that need for profit and growth.
On a more general point, Sheffield had too short a runway, to attract the low-cost airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet and in any case Manchester, Leeds and East Midlands were all within an hours drive. There is now even the new Robin Hood Airport on the former RAF Finningley.
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