A UK aviation hub with nearly a century of flying history has handled its final commercial passenger flight, ahead of redevelopment into an industrial premises. Coventry Airport, a Warwickshire hub serving the Midlands region, closed on 11 June 2026.
Staff operating the airport’s last passenger flight on 5 June may never forget the occasion, since it involved some special guests. Members of the famous 1990s British boy band Take That were aboard, having been in the city performing their Circus Live tour.
Writing on social media platform Facebook, the airport said: “Those nice gentlemen from ‘Take That’ flew into Coventry Airport this evening and when they found out that they were our last ever passengers on our last booked commercial flight prior to closing, they insisted on a photograph with the ground crew to mark the occasion.”
As previously reported by Travel Tomorrow, Coventry Airport started life as Baginton Aerodrome in 1936 and became a fighter airfield during the Second World War. It was damaged in Hitler’s devastating 1940 Coventry Blitz. As well as military service, it has witnessed almost every aspect of aviation, from cargo to medical, and commercial passenger traffic, as well as the rise of package holidays to Austria, Italy, and Spain in the eighties, and budget flights to Poland with Wizz from the 2000s.
The boys from Take That are not the only famous guests. On his only trip to the UK in 1982, Pope John Paul II held Mass for around 350,000 people there. The hub is also home to the Midlands Air Museum.
But planning permission has already been approved for a battery manufacturing plant on the site, which is being rebaptised as Greenpower Park. Greenlit in 2022, the partnership between Coventry City Council and Coventry Airport received a £23-million (€26.6-million) cash injection from West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) in January 2025.
Designed to give the area what former city councillor Jim O’Boyle called “an economic lift” and create over 30,000 jobs, the €2.5-billion venture forms part of a wider West Midlands Investment Zone, with manufacturing sites at Coventry and Warwick Gigapark, Birmingham Knowledge Quarter, and the Wolverhampton Green Innovation Corridor.
In contrast, stakeholders at another historic UK hub, Manston Airport in Kent, have been consulting on a possible reopening. Investment firm RiverOak Strategic Partners (RSP) has described plans there as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver new runway capacity to support the UK air cargo market and to transform the economic landscape in East Kent.”
