Hoy
Note: This map might not be exactly correct, but close enough to provide the position within the UK. If anybody can kindly either confirm this position is correct, or provide a more exact location, this advice will be most welcome.
HOY: Civil regional airport later just civil aerodrome? (also known as LONGHOPE)
Operated by: 1980s/1990s: Orkney Islands Council
British airline users: 1930s: Highland Airways*
1980s: Loganair?
Location: E of B9047, 0.5nm SW of Longhope village.
Period of operation: 1930s? 1972 to 1993 only?
Note: This map is reproduced with the kind permission of Pooley's Flight Equipment Ltd. Copyright Robert Pooley 2014.
Runways: 1993: 05/23 440x30 grass 13/31 300x30 grass
NOTES: *Is it known if Highland Airways used this site in the 1930s, or perhaps more likely, another location? If so does anybody know where this was?
SHORT RUNWAYS
These really are very short runways and being grass not too many modern GA light aircraft could safely use them. In fact most would wisely avoid such short runways even if they were hard!
Nevertheless in more recent years the Brittan-Norman Islander type was regularly flown into airfields this small, (indeed, in 1990 scheduled services operated from Monday to Saturday), and it is an enormous tribute to the type and especially the pilots that flew this sort of operation, safely performed, time and time again.
A PERSONAL NOTE
I well remember being at a Farnborough Air Show in about 1975 when both the Concorde and the Islander were being displayed and saying to my wife that I thought the future for the British aviation industry lay much more in developing types like the Islander than Concorde. Even then I thought that the Concorde would never succeed commercially, especially as the U.S.A. had decided to do everything possible to prevent it being viable.
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