BOURNEMOUTH Airport is on a stronger “growth trajectory” than before the Covid crisis, its boss has said, after winning new passenger routes and building up a cargo operation.

The airport currently has around 95 per cent of the passenger numbers it had before coronavirus brought most international travel to a halt in 2020.

Ryanair announced in December it would base a second aircraft at the Hurn site and add three new routes to its summer schedules for 2023, making 18 summer destinations.

TUI is also stepping up its activity, while cargo operations have helped underpin the airport despite the disruption caused by the war in Ukraine.

Managing director Steve Gill said the airport had “done better than most” at bouncing back from the Covid crisis.

“We’re currently back up to about 95 per cent of pre-Covid levels of passenger operations, which is a fantastic place to be, but outside that, this airport has a wider array of operations – general aviation, maintenance, repair and overhaul, and we’ve started to build a cargo operation which really helped us through the Covid challenges and is still here today,” he said.

“We have strong hopes to continue to build that, so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket, and what we do have in the passenger world has proved to be resilient and has bounced back strongly.”

When Bournemouth Airport was sold to Regional and City Airports (RCA), part of the Rigby Group, in 2017, plans to grow airline operations to three million passengers a year seemed to have stalled at 700,000. RCA insisted there was plenty of potential to expand activity there.

“In the year pre-Covid, we were growing at about 20 per cent, so Covid derailed us and a lot of other industries,” Mr Gill said.

“We’re back to where we were and Ryanair will give us a 30 per cent growth in the year ahead, so we’re back to a stronger growth trajectory than we were pre-Covid – and the more scale we add and the more choice we add, I’m pretty confident that will only give us more opportunities to continue to build on what you see today.

“TUI currently have on sale 13 destinations. EasyJet will be starting their programme again shortly offering flights to Geneva for the ski season.”

Cargo operations at the airport were almost non-existent until 2020, but were developed quickly to bring tens of millions of pieces of personal protective equipment and Covid testing kits into the country.

As well as regular flights to the Far East, the airport saw regular charter flights to JFK Airport in New York under DHL.

Cargo movements in 2021 totalled around 20,000 tonnes.

“About two thirds of that was Covid related. We’ve obviously moved away from that but we’ve maintained operations, particularly to South East Asia," said Mr Gill. 

European Aviation recently secured approval to turn six Airbus A340 passenger aircraft into cargo planes based at Bournemouth and has options to do the same with six more.

“Alongside that, we’ve set up our own transit shed capability, so we now look after all our own customs, import and export activity in-house, alongside everything else we already do in-house,” Mr Gill added.

The cargo industry is “quite volatile”, he said, with the war in Ukraine and rising fuel prices making life tough for the whole sector.

“But like everything else we do, we’ve built a model where we’re able to offer a product to the market in a very efficient manner at a good price with great customer service and that’s stood us in good stead,” he said.

“It’s helped underpin the operation at the airport, kept everything sustainable and gives us a good position for additional growth in the year ahead.”