Teesside Airport

Closes as Alicante

Flight Approaches

Scott Hunter

8 May 2025

Friday 2 May, and Ryanair flight FR5985 from Alicante was due to land at Teesside Airport at 19.45.  It got as far as Leeds (airspace) before taking a detour to Manchester, eventually arriving at Teesside at around 9pm. How did that come about? It has been reported that it was because the requisite staff were not available at the airport to process the landing.

So, with a full planeload of passengers on a commercial flight, and the departure lounge full of the passengers due to board the same plane at 20.10, the airport was shut down. Remarkable, but, sadly, true.

This was first reported by a (disgruntled) passenger on the flight.  That is verified by the flight tracker:

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/RYR5985

The disgruntled passenger posted on social media that the pilot announced the reason for the diversion over the tannoy. This was that, as the plane could not land at Teesside at the specified time, that it could not, in fact,  land before 20.00. The plane did not have enough fuel to circle and would have to divert to Manchester for refueling. The passenger also reported that the pilot expressed some frustration that he had not been informed of the closure until late in the flight.

We wrote to Teesside Airport to ask for verification of this. We received none (much as we expected). Their press enquiries team can be a bit shy.

At this point we started to wonder how long the airport staffing issue had continued, and so we checked the tracker to see whether there had been delays to earlier flights. The movement that preceded the Alicante arrival was the 19.15 departure to Humberside, which the tracker shows departed on time.

So, depending on the nature of the crisis, the staffing issue may have occurred some time between 19.15 and 19.45, a fairly narrow window. In the absence of further information, we are left wondering if the issue may have been at Air Traffic Control (ATC), where we are aware there have been problems in the past.

In 2022, it was reported to us that, such were the chronic staff shortages at ATC, whenever someone went on a tea break, they had to shut the airport down. One incident we reported (pigs-might-fly-an-update-for-visitors-to-teesside-airport-part-2) is here:

“It has been reported to us (by those who listen to airband radio) that ATC has been experiencing some difficulty in running the service on a full-time basis. So acute is the problem now that they have to keep closing the airport down. And so it was on the morning of 9 August, when they closed at 10.20, which was particularly inconvenient for the RAF Hercules that was due to begin a crew training exercise at 10.30. The inconvenience was exacerbated by the fact that ATC didn’t inform the pilot/crew. So, when they tried to call up ATC prior starting the training exercise, they got no reply and had no choice but to turn round and abandon the training. ATC reopened the airport at 10.45. Awkward.”

Is the latest incident an example of the same (unresolved) staffing issue?



And the £12.5 Million Gift from the TVCA …

Now with losses amounting to £150 million since it was taken back into public ownership in 2019, the airport was awarded a grant of £12.5 million in March this year. The grant was ostensibly to develop the estate rather than support aviation, despite the fact that the airport had recently declared losses of £13.4 million for the previous year. Now there is further evidence that, three years after we first reported it, the airport is still struggling to manage its core business.

And yet, while there is anecdotal evidence that trainees have recently been made redundant, staff numbers (and costs) continue to rise, as shown here in the most recent statement of accounts:

 find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02020423/filing-history

Overall staff numbers rose from 124 in 2023 to 153 in 2024, the wage bill rose by £1 million, and staff in airport operations rose by 50%. 

And still they close the airport at short notice when a flight is due imminently. And the members of TVCA cabinet simply surrender when asked to approve an airport grant of £12.5 million (as we reported here).  Those overseeing the Best Value Notice at the TVCA have their work cut out for them.