RELEASE of provisional figures showing the slump in numbers of passengers using Durham Tees Valley Airport makes for depressing reading. After years of seeming relentless expansion, the airport’s business has shrunk to what it was in the 1970s.

Such a decline surely begs the question of whether the airport is sustainable in the long-term, especially when the growth of Leeds-Bradford and Newcastle Airports is taken into consideration.

The importance of the airport to the economy of northern North Yorkshire and southern County Durham should not be underestimated, but the airport’s owners have a responsibility to shareholders not the region. Would they walk away and what would happen to the airport then? The former council partners could not afford to take it back into public ownership.

Ten years or more ago, a highly controversial strategy document drawn up by One North East suggested that the longterm future of the region’s two airports would be best served by Newcastle concentrating on passengers and what was then Teesside Airport concentrating on freight. Political uproar ensured a quick revision of the report, but perhaps the first draft was right?