Where many of its rivals have been struggling in the last financial year to October 2008, Scotland’s Flyglobespan came back into a profit of £1,2million from a pre-tax loss of £19.3million in the previous year. And this was against a steep rise in aviation fuel costs and a shrinking economy.

It did this by performing a stringent business analysis which has seen it end the practice of using Icelandair planes to operate transatlantic routes, to drop those routes, to concentrate on short-haul European routes it could operate with its own planes and to work for the highest loads.

It has also recently won a Ministry of Defence (MOD) contract to fly service personnel from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to the Falklands and to Qatar.

Although it has dropped the transatlantic routes serviced by planes from Icelandair like Glasgow to Boston and Liverpool to New York, it is still flying to North America.

The big news is, usefully for Homecoming Scotland 2009, that Flyglobespan is to start a new route from Glasgow to Halifax in Nova Scotia in May this year.

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