WHAT a turnaround for Teesside airport. Two years after being told by the regional development agency, One NorthEast, that its future was as a big air freight depot, with passenger services being concentrated at Newcastle, along comes the same body bearing £6m to develop it further for passengers.

Plans for the ambitious freight development on the south side of the airport have been rightly scaled down. The 6,000 jobs pie-in-the-sky project always looked unlikely given the size of the local economy. A more realistic scheme will mean more freight passing through, but not on the scale feared by some local residents in Middleton St George and other nearby villages.

The growth of passenger traffic should continue, driven by local demand rather than back-of-the-envelope ideas. Teesside is proving a popular airport for the charter holiday market and that popularity should increase still further with the improvements to the road and rail links promised by One NorthEast and its partners.

The RDA is to be congratulated on recognising a developing market at Teesside and helping to facilitate the airport's further growth, rather than supposing it could somehow dictate to the region's air passengers where they flew from.