HAVE the owners of Durham Tees Valley Airport finally given up on a vital part of our regional infrastructure?

There is a growing feeling among residents close to the airport, a feeling shared by people across the region, that Peel’s master plan for the site is based around house-building and business development, and its days as an airport are numbered.

A quick glance at the passenger numbers fuel concerns that the aviation side of the operation is in terminal decline – falling from almost a million a year to just over 100,000 in the past decade and showing no signs of recovery.

The owners have repeatedly told the Echo they have tried to bring new flights to the airport and insist they regard the aviation operations as a key part of the long-term strategy.

They argue that developing the site for new homes and ancillary services in the meantime will help to generate income that secures the airport during its protracted slump, which stretches back to the loss of direct flights to London.

We could understand it when Durham Tees Valley suffered during the recession. Like other small airports it lost services as airlines pulled out and passenger numbers fell accordingly.

But the national and local economy have been emerging from the downturn for the last three or four years. No one would claim that this is a boom time for the area but Newcastle International has attracted new flights in recent years, such as its transatlantic services to New York, and Peel’s airports in Liverpool and Doncaster have been on the up too. Why haven’t we seen a similar revival at Durham Tees Valley?

Peel say that building hundreds of homes will help buy them time until the airline industry has picked up.

We fear that by then hopes of a recovery for DTVA will have been permanently grounded.