Perth Airport is a general aviation airport located at New Scone, northeast of Perth, Scotland. The airport is used by private and business aircraft, and for pilot training. There are no commercial scheduled flights from the airport. Perth Aerodrome has a CAA Ordinary Licence that allows flights for the public transport of passengers or for flying instruction as authorised by the licensee. The airport operator is ACS Aviation Ltd, which operates the airport daily from 09:00 to 17:00.
History
The airport opened in 1936 as Scone Aerodrome. A flight training school, training military pilots, was established shortly after the airport was opened. Immediately after the start of the war, researchers working on aircraft-mounted radars were stationed at Scone for a brief period, fitting their radar systems to various aircraft. The site was unsuitable for such work, and the team moved to a new site in Wales in November. During the war 309 and 666 Squadrons from the Royal Air Force used the aerodrome. The only scheduled commercial flights operated briefly from Perth were a British Airways service to Stavanger in Norway at the beginning of the second world war, and a post-war BEA service to Glasgow's Renfrew airport. The airport was subsequently bought by Airwork Services, which continued the long tradition of pilot training at Perth. By 1960 Airwork acquired Air Service Training, an engineering training school, which it relocated from the south of England to the airport. The whole operation took on the AST name. AST gained a worldwide reputation for aviation training, being known as Britain's Air University. Students of more than 100 countries have been trained at Perth. Following a worldwide downturn in aviation, AST pulled out of pilot training in 1996. The site was then bought by Morris Leslie Ltd. Perth Airport remains Scotland's main airport for general aviation and is the base of the Scottish Aero Club which was founded in 1927. The airport is home to flight training organisations providing private and commercial flight training, as well as micro light and autogyro training. Also on site is an aircraft maintenance company, ACS Engineering, and numerous other non aviation related businesses. AST, which is now part of Perth College, retains a presence at the airport and continues to offer aeronautical engineering courses. In 2011, AST announced a returned to airline pilot training. Scotland's Charity Air Ambulance was formed in 2012 and launched a helicopter air ambulance in May 2013 to assist the Scottish Air Ambulance Service to deliver front-line care to time-critical emergencies across Scotland. SCAA provides a fully equipped medical helicopter that can be deployed from its central base at Perth Airport to incidents across the length and breadth of Scotland. .
