Is Glasgow airport doomed?

Dear readers — many of you will remember our excellent long read about a plan to redesign Glasgow’s rail network. Gareth Dennis, rail engineer and commentator, took a big red pen to the local map, building a new north-south tunnel and extra rail links to the east and the west. (You can read it here.)

We got back in touch with Dennis a few months ago, when the news broke that the airport’s parent company (ASG) was being sold to AviAlliance. What was his take, we wondered, on the airport’s future?

Little did we know what we’d started. After pondering the question, Dennis made a bold prediction in his popular RailNatter podcast last month — that the airport would close by the 2040s. It’s a sign of Dennis’ influence that local politicians of all stripes reacted angrily. 

“Given the importance of the airport for jobs and Scotland’s wider economy, this individual who has thousands of subscribers needs to urgently explain why he believes Glasgow Airport does not have a viable future,” said Scottish Conservatives transport spokesperson Sue Webber. Her Labour counterpart, Claire Baker, agreed the airport should “have a bright future” but also took the opportunity to throw some criticism at the SNP, saying the party of government “needs to show some ambition and set out a plan to help aviation drive growth and decarbonise”. 

As for the government themselves, they even got in on the act, with a Transport Scotland spokesperson telling The Scotsman that they supported “Glasgow Airport’s ambitions of securing more direct routes” and are “committed to working with Scotland's airports and airlines to help grow our international connectivity”. 

But is Dennis a prophet that they should be heeding, instead of condemning? After all, the data we have on Glasgow’s airport suggest it’s already in serious trouble. In 2023, it had only 7.4 million passengers, much lower than before the pandemic and scarcely half of Edinburgh’s numbers (14.4 million). The gap between the two is bigger than ever.

So, having inadvertently started this controversy, we wanted to give Dennis a chance to say his piece. Why is he so certain the airport’s days are numbered? Does he think there’s any way it can be saved? And would that even be a good thing?

Q: What are the major problems facing Glasgow Airport? 

Gareth Dennis: The challenge you’ve got for airport capacity in [the central belt] of Scotland, is achieving the demand to justify having two major international airports. I adore Glasgow but compared to Edinburgh, it has more international demand. If you’re an airline and you're going, ‘where am I going to base most of my flights? What's going to make sure that I get the maximum load factors on the flights that I'm running?’, you're going to find yourself being drawn to Edinburgh. 

What compounds this, is that Glasgow Airport is on the wrong side of Glasgow to serve a larger urban area — it was built as an RAF airfield, facing the Atlantic. Basically, what’s within an hour of Glasgow Airport is a much smaller splash on the map than what’s within the hour from Edinburgh Airport. From an international perspective — which is where the cash comes from — Edinburgh has got that higher level of commercial pull. 

Glasgow Airport was pretty solid until 2007, when Edinburgh’s passenger numbers began outstripping it. What happened?

Through the mid-2000s Edinburgh started gaining enormous international appeal, particularly for the festival, and the Scottish government placed a lot of priority on connecting the airport via the tram connection and Gateway Station. You had an emphasis on [public transport] connections to the airport, driven by Edinburgh being the heart of political power — politicians used it for their short haul flights down to London. As the autonomy and power of the devolved government grew, the need for those politicians to be flying in and out of that airport, to get in and out of Holyrood, grew. So Edinburgh Airport also became the priority over Glasgow from a politician’s perspective.