Come fly with me

There's an airport on the old RAF base at Finningley known in the flying world as Robin Hood Airport, or Doncaster Sheffield - DSA if you want the official code.  I think Robin Hood Airport is used for the tourists... and therefore not used very much.  We have flown out of here a couple of times when it was fairly new, still building the food outlets in the departures area as I remember.  Nowadays they are replacing the outlets with vending machines, such is the volume of traffic it gets.  When it was being planned, much was made of the super long runway able to handle trans-continental flights with ease which other existing airports couldn't do, such as Humbleside, Sheffield, Leeds Bradford.  I'm not sure about East Midlands, but I'll be surprised if it's not long enough.  Anyway, most of the 'pro' argument was about this long runway and the potential for such but it all sounded a bit too good to be true, and a recent Sheffield airport built a few years previously had turned into a white elephant, well, an unused airport.  At the time I was a frequent flyer our of Humbleside and I must admit there seemed a possibility that HUY could be swallowed up by this much grander, newer neighbour.  Not that I was that bothered, but it would have meant getting up a bit earlier on Mondays. So, when it opened and Thompson moved all of their East Midlands regional flights there (hence us flying out) it didn't look good for HUY and others.  However, within a couple of years or so, tales began to emerge of huge monthly losses, airlines pulling out and passenger traffic not reaching predictions and falling.  I have just driven around the surrounding area (scenic route on the way to Bawtry) and there is a huge amount of land just standing empty with roads disappearing into some scrubland.  They obviously had big plans, but it has come to (almost) nothing.  I occasionally see an Easyjet flight landing, and there are a handful of ThompsonFly flights, but the main airline based there is a low cost Polish carrier flying to various destinations in Poland. Coming over here, taking our airports.

Did a few miles on the rollers again last night, thats 3 times this week.  The Garmin upload didn't seem to work correctly, showing 0.9 miles, and that will never do!   I think it was 15 miles in 45 mins, so I'll have to correct that - can't have anyone thinking I'm not doing much.