Qualla: Land's End Airport

Land's End Airport: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Bagshaw, CC BY-SA 2.5. It is five nautical miles west of Penzance and almost nothing else. From the threshold of runway 12 you can see all the way to the Atlantic. Britten Norman Islanders sit on the apron in the morning light, their windows fogged with dew, waiting to make the twenty-eight-mile hop out to St Mary's in the Isles of Scilly. There are no jet bridges, no escalators, no automated announcements. There is a control tower, a small café, and a hangar that came down from Blackpool by lorry in 1937. Land's End - ICAO code EGHC - is the way you get to a place where roads stop mattering.

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Image: Daniel Bagshaw | CC BY-SA 2.5

Land's End Airport: Cobham's Idea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. The route was the dream of Sir Alan Cobham, the great between-the-wars aviator who saw the Scillies as the obvious case for British civil aviation. He started planning a Land's End to Scilly link in 1935. Cobham's company was soon absorbed by Olley Air Service, and a subsidiary c...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Land's End Airport: Through Wartime

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Most British civil flying was grounded between 1939 and 1945. The Scilly service was not. Great Western and Southern Airlines, the holding company by 1938, kept it running through the war, swapping the Dragons for slightly bigger de Havilland Dragon Rapides as the lifeline became...

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Image: Public domain

Land's End Airport: Grass and Mud

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Row17, CC BY-SA 2.0. Until 2014, every runway at Land's End was grass. This worked very well for most of the twentieth century, but Cornish winters do not forgive grass aerodromes. In 2012-13 and again in 2013-14 the runways became so waterlogged that the airport simply closed for long stretches, wit...

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Image: Row17 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Land's End Airport: Britten-Norman Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Northmetpit, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fleet that flies from Land's End today is small, sturdy, and unmistakably itself. Britten-Norman Islanders - high-winged, twin-engined, designed in the 1960s for exactly this kind of short island work - line up each morning for the 15-minute flight to St Mary's. Skybus operat...

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Image: Northmetpit | CC BY-SA 4.0

Land's End Airport: The Edge of Britain

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CornwallFlyer, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the air, the place reveals itself best. The airfield occupies a flat patch of cropland on the high western plateau of the Penwith peninsula, a couple of miles inland from the actual Land's End headland. To the north the cliffs run past Sennen, Cape Cornwall, Botallack, Geevo...

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Image: CornwallFlyer | CC BY-SA 4.0