UK regional airline Loganair is to open its tenth base at Southampton Airport, generating new jobs, specifically for pilots, cabin crew and engineers from the local area, and offering new flight connections to and from the region.

The Southampton base allows the airline to efficiently serve southern mainland and island communities and will increase the number of seats available through the airline by over 140,000 per year. It is planned that the base will be operated by two ATR-72 600 aircraft, with the first aircraft arriving in October 2025.

In addition to the news of this new base for the airline, it has announced plans to launch two new routes, as well as increasing capacity for one of its existing flights. From October 26th, new routes from Southampton to Manchester and Manchester to Exeter have been added to the airline’s timetable, while the capacity of aircraft serving the popular Southampton to Edinburgh route has been increased from 49 to 72 passengers. New routes via Manchester to Inverness and Aberdeen will also become available.

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Luke Farajallah, chief executive officer at Loganair, said: “We are delighted to be announcing a new base in Southampton, which is a logical and important strategic step for the UK’s largest regional airline. Loganair is very familiar with operations to and from the South Coast, and we feel confident the local market will respond well to our more permanent presence and new routes through the basing of two aircraft later this year”.

“We would like to thank our partners at AGS (Aberdeen, Glasgow & Southampton Airport Group) for working with our teams to deliver a new dimension to our existing partnership, and we look forward to enabling growth as we develop this new base”.

Loganair has nine other bases including: Kirkwall, Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, City of Derry, Newcastle and Isle of Man.