Edinburgh airport has been operating under a bit of a cloud for the last two years or so since the announcement that BAA would be selling the airport after the Competition Commission had ruled that the company could not continue to operate the airports at both Glasgow and Edinburgh, with BAA eventually opting to sell the smaller of the two.

After a long series of false alarms, the airport was eventually acquired by Global Infrastructure Partners with the deal being finalised only in April of this year in a £807m deal, with ownership officially changing hands at the beginning of June.

However, the new people in charge of the airport in Edinburgh have again shown that that well-known adage “a new broom sweeps clean” is very true, because less than two weeks after being handed the keys to Edinburgh Airport, the new management has succeeded in adding two new destinations to the roster. The first will be to the exotic Sharm El Sheikh airport in Tunisia and the second being to the largely unpronounceable Bydgoszcz airport in Poland.

November will see twice-weekly flights arrive and depart from Edinburgh to Bydgoszcz, operated by OLT Airlines who are also due to commence a weekly service to Lodz. Starting from the same month.

Any changeover in management will inevitably bring with it some new faces. However, in Edinburgh Airport’s case it will also see the return of a familiar one in the shape of Gordon Dewar who returns to his native city, as well as to the airport we had held a number of management posts as the airport’s new/old chief executive, returning to Edinburgh after a long spell as CEO at Bahrain International Airport.

All in all, the situation at Scottish airports is generally encouraging with figures recently released showing a healthy increase in passenger numbers for May 2012 in relation to May 2011.

Of all the airports still managed by BAA the one that performed the best was in Aberdeen which produced a 15.7% increase in passenger numbers for May, while Glasgow airport increased its passenger flow by 9.8%. Possibly understandably Edinburgh, in its last month under the BAA label saw the passenger flow rise by just 2.2%.

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