HIGHLANDS & ISLANDS Airports Ltd is booming with 1m total passengers through the 10 airports for the 2004/5 financial year a strong possibility and half a million passengers for Inverness a near certainty. Much of the growth has to be attributed to the expansion of the London routes to the capital of the Highlands. When British Airways moved its London services from Heathrow to Gatwick at the start of the winter season 1996 it was all doom and gloom. Heathrow is now back since the start of the summer with a single BMI flight, BA goes three times daily from Gatwick and easyJet has daily services (but twice on Sundays) from both Gatwick and Luton. There are also several flights each day by Eastern Airways from both Birmingham and Manchester but the Snowflake twice-weekly service from Stockholm is shortly to stop, an MD80 too large for the route. Inverness has also commissioned, for the first time, an ILS on both runways, which should reduce diversions to a minimum during the winter.
http://www.hial.co.uk