Qualla: St Mary's Airport, Isles of Scilly

St Mary's Airport, Isles of Scilly: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Bagshaw, CC BY-SA 2.5. Before there was a runway here, planes landed on the golf course. In 1937, Channel Air Ferries began scheduled service from Land's End to the Isles of Scilly, and the pilots simply set their de Havilland Dragons down on the fairways between Hugh Town and Porth Hellick Bay. Two years later, in August 1939, the Council converted High Cross Farm into a proper airfield, just in time for the Second World War to define what flying to these islands actually meant. Today the airport sits a single nautical mile east of Hugh Town, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, operated by the Council of the Isles of Scilly, and serving as the only fixed-wing connection between Britain's southwestern-most populated rocks and the mainland thirty miles away.

Image: Daniel Bagshaw | CC BY-SA 2.5

St Mary's Airport, Isles of Scilly: A Runway Carved from a Farm

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. High Cross Farm became an airport in August 1939, and the conversion was as humble as it sounds. Photographs from the opening show a small group of dignitaries - Earl Amherst representing Great Western and Southern Air Lines, the chairman of the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company,...

Image: Public domain

St Mary's Airport, Isles of Scilly: The Dragon and the Dragon Rapide

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Heardman, CC BY-SA 2.0. Great Western and Southern Airlines took over the route in 1938, replacing the original twin-engined Dragons with the slightly larger de Havilland Dragon Rapides during the war years. These were fabric-and-plywood biplanes, designed for short hops to communities that no other air...

Image: Alan Heardman | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Mary's Airport, Isles of Scilly: The Disaster of 1983

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott at en.wikipedia, Public domain. On 16 July 1983, a British Airways Helicopters Sikorsky S-61 on a routine scheduled flight from Penzance crashed into the sea two nautical miles short of St Mary's Airport. Nineteen passengers and one crew member were killed. Six people survived - four passengers and two crew - p...

Image: Andrewrabbott at en.wikipedia | Public domain

St Mary's Airport, Isles of Scilly: The Footpath and the Runway

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Davey, CC BY-SA 2.0. A public footpath crosses within a few metres of the southern end of the runway, and it is closed by warning lights and bells a few minutes before each take-off or landing. Walkers stop, the bells ring, a small twin-engined Britten-Norman Islander or de Havilland Twin Otter from ...

Image: John Davey | CC BY-SA 2.0