Argyll and Bute Council success with 16th June start of flights between Oban, Colonsay, Coll and Tiree
newsroom published this on 1:57 pm, Tuesday, 10th June, 2008Local Government| News| Transport | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
Highland Airways is now taking bookings for flights on Argyll’s new air services launching on Monday 16th June between Oban and the islands of Colonsay, Coll and Tiree. In general, flight prices will be discounted for booking well ahead. This is obviously very good news for the islands and for Oban. The timing is helpful at this stage of the tourist season.
This launch is also a celebratory moment for the officers of Argyll and Bute Council who have driven this development. The Council deserves great credit for the long-sighted strategic management of this project. The facilities have been designed and built to support future capacity, meaning that later developments will be cheaper and faster to implementation than they would otherwise have been. An example is that where anticipated development would outgrow the current buildings, these have been designed and sited to enable extension and operational consistency.
The calibre of the strategic thinking, the ambition for Argyll and the delivery of the project in quite a tight timescale are not always characteristic of the Council and should be warmly recognised.
Colin Munro, Area Manager of Highland Airways, the operator of the services, says: ‘The Council has had a very good functional team that has worked closely with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), thinking ahead from the start. Highland Airways, as the operator, is coming in at the end of this process and we have been given first class facilities to work with’.
The CAA has restricted the licenses to ‘visual flight rules’ because the airstrips at Coll and Colonsay do not have runway lights or navigational aids. Flights will operate in daylight hours and when visibility is sufficiently good.
Highland Airways does not anticipate service interruptions on these grounds. Colin Munro points out that the facilities at these airstrips are perfectly adequate and that the only predicted impact on flight schedules is from gale force winds and fog – conditions that would ground flights in any case.
In terms of changes to schedules allowing for the darker times of the year, we understand that the morning flight times will remain stable throughout the year, with the afternoon flights pulled back by around two hours to allow for the planes to return to Oban before dusk.
The photograph above shows the Highland Airways plane G-SEIL landing at Coll’s new airstrip. And for good measure, if you’d like to see it taxi-ing in, here it is. The photographs were taken on a training flight into Coll.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Yes, congratulations to our elected representatives, and also to all those who worked to see the project to fruition. Island residents believed - rightly or wrongly - that some families were unwilling to become resident (or in other cases to remain) because their children were unable to get home from school at weekends. This was the fundamental reason which led to the request for an air-service, although of course the desirability of such factors as social-inclusion, economic stimulation and access to professional services became apparent during subsequent research for the business plan.
Over the years, and even now, there have been critics of this project. Such critics should ask whether the existing ferry service should have been the limit to which Colonsay can aspire, bearing in mind that this is the most remote community in Great Britain. (The criteria for a community being a place with a shop, a church and a school - no such community in GB is further from its nearest neighbour than is Colonsay). If one accepts that at some future date additional communication might be desirable, should it be by additional sailings of a £20m ship and a crew of 30? Or does it make sense to use an 8-seater aircraft? Remember that, in the rest of the world, aircraft were initially used to access remote communities, as in Australia, Canada, Africa and India… it is surely perverse that in UK there were regular flights between Birmingham and London before such provision reached the most disadvantaged location.
It should also be remembered that very specific criteria were outlined by residents in Colonsay (and presumably in Coll), concerning the environmental impact - no overhead wires, careful drainage to ensure unchanged flora, modest building, single-track access etc. All these criteria have been met.
The new facility is properly licensed and regulated by the CAA; this was obviously important to the parents of all the children concerned. As it happens, the new tarmac runway and licensed field has proved attractive and private aircraft now visit the island. Numbers will never be great, but some days there are four or five - roughly as many planes as there are yachts visiting the harbour. Some or all of these visitors may well choose to come for a longer stay in the future.
The aerodrome in Colonsay is subject to Visual Flight Rules - this is exactly as was always envisaged. Medical evacuations by helicopter can be undertaken in the dark, with the assistance of Colonsay coastguard - indeed, in emergency even fixed-wing aircraft have landed in the past (with help of flares). There was never a plan for night-time operations and it should be noted that even our ferries do not normally berth in Colonsay during hours of darkness, nor in fog. One imagines that very few people would wish to fly except “when visibility is sufficiently good”.
In the coming weeks, there will be more detail of scholar flights for the seven pupils from Colonsay and (we believe) seventeen from Coll; and ancillary services (ground transportation etc.) will be developed. The new facility has already brought considerable economic benefit to the community in Colonsay and one hopes that this is just the beginning of the story.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
So many interesting insights in this post - the immediate use of the new airstrip by private light aircraft; children getting home from school at weekends; the conscious marriage of the new facilities with their island environment; the sheer informed realism of the assessment of the value to the island of this new service; the economic benefit that the project has already delivered - before scheduled flights begin on Monday; the degree of remoteness of the Colonsay community; the insistence on the right to aspire. This captures the essence of a very specific place.