Terry Liddiard, spokesman for TravelWatch, has spoken out over Flybe’s decision to close its Isle of Man base, after the Watchdog’s public meeting on Saturday.
Flybe announced on Friday that it would be closing its Isle of Man base next March resulting in the loss of 49 jobs.
Flybe will also be closing five other regional airports and there will be around 500 redundancies in total throughout the UK.
Mr Liddiard said: ‘We had a record attendance for one of our meetings which just shows how people feel about the air issues at the moment.
‘A lot of the pilots and crews from Flybe were there too.
‘We told the government four or five years ago that this was inevitable and in fact it’s probably happened even faster than we said it would.
‘We’re hoping that the Scotland route will return at the end of March but we haven’t heard anything about London City.
‘It’s an unbelievable situation really.
Asked about Guernsey having its own airline and if the Isle of Man should follow suit, he said: ‘I spoke to the treasury about this some time ago and was told ‘We just can’t afford it’, but then they told me they hadn’t ever done an assessment even!
‘We don’t need a closed skies policy but you do need some light control over who uses the airspace and some regulation. No control at all just hasn’t worked.
‘The major worry in all this is businesses pulling out of the island, we have had some businesses say that they don’t know how they can continue here if there are no flights to London.
‘Obviously it will hit leisure and tourism too.
‘But we had terrific interest at the meeting.
‘Some people have been working here since 1982, such as engineers and pilots, the union boss had the awful job of pulling all the Flybe staff together and telling them about the job losses when they first knew.’
Infrastructure minister, David Cretney, has expressed his sadness and concern at the announcement.saying that his department and the DED would do all they could to help staff find alternative employment in the island.’