Diary of a Shopkeeper, 7th June

Next time I’ll drive…

My first visit to Orkney was aged 11 in 1976, on a family holiday. Apart from experiencing the joy of Stromness Shopping Week – including winning third prize in the sack race at Marwick Park – the highlight of the holiday was my first ever flight. We flew up to Sanday for the day, and the sensation of zooming skywards in a tiny plane, not much bigger than our Renault 4, was exhilarating. Even better was the pilot banking low over skerries of basking seals, sending them galumphing into the sea.

I don’t remember much of the day on Sanday, except sand in sandwiches on a huge white beach, and a visit to a factory making strange rubber masks. (Is that possible? I can find no trace of such an enterprise online, yet the memory is vivid, even after 50 years.) Whatever we did on the island was insignificant compared to the thrill of getting there and back on the Islander, with the pilot sitting two feet in front of me.

I immediately developed a great affection for the Britten-Norman Islander, and for Loganair. So much so that, when I saw a black and red vinyl shoulder bag in a Kirkwall shop featuring the company’s logo and the outline of my favourite plane, I just has to spend my holiday money on it. That bag carried my books and jotters to school and back through several years of secondary. I only discarded it when the plastic piping round the edges wore out, uncovering a sharp wire which scratched a long crescent cut across my chin. I’ve checked: it’s faded but still faintly visible. Scarred for life by Loganair!

Despite that, my feelings towards the company have been overwhelmingly positive ever since that first flight. My admiration for the pilots and crew who fly in very difficult conditions, and for the ground staff who make it all possible, has never diminished. I’m sure most folk in the county would feel the same. Whether we fly occasionally or frequently, we’ve come to think of Loganair as an intrinsic part of island life. Occasionally frustrating, often expensive, but nonetheless as Orcadian as clapshot and the ba.

Thirty-four years of living here have meant I’ve used Loganair scores of times, maybe even hundreds. There have been flights to Papay to play music, and to North Ronaldsay to sell books for Tam Macphail. To North Ronaldsay to stay in the bird observatory and further north to Shetland – the shortest international flight in the world. Heading in the other directions there have been Loganair flights that started me off on long wine-related journeys to France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. And I’ve had multiple reasons for visiting every Scottish city and quite a few English ones. One happy flight I will never forget is the one that brought Ingrid and I, and our three-day-old daughter, back from the maternity unit in Aberdeen.

Most Orcadians will have a similar mix of memories. Loganair wasn’t just Scotland’s airline, it was Orkney’s airline. But is it any longer? This week it announced the cancellation of almost all flights to Shetland, and almost all to Inverness. This affected me personally, as I’d booked tickets to attend a literary event in Inverness in August on flights that suddenly no longer exist. Hundreds of other folk will have had more important reasons for travelling, maybe for medical reasons, or to visit family.

The galling part of Loganair’s statement of explanation was this: ‘We can no longer sustain the current level of service without impacting the wider business.’ In other words, other routes are more important than the ones that connect Orkney to its neighbours to the north and south. What’s sad is that the ‘wider business’ they’re looking out for doesn’t appear to include our Scottish island comrades in places like Barra or Stornoway. The BBC reported that Loganair was starting a regular timetable between Norwich and Jersey, this being ‘the second of four new summer routes the airline was launching from its Channel Islands base. It said this […] would be followed by Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Bordeaux as part of a ‘major expansion of services.’

Loganair’s inter-island services are subsidised by the OIC, but its national flights have to pay their own way. That doesn’t seem to be mission impossible: in its last published accounts, Loganair reported profits of £11 million, and paid dividends to its owners of £8 million. From the company’s point of view, they’re a commercial business, and have to arrange their activities to bring the greatest benefits to their shareholders.From our point of view, they provide a lifeline service. It seems reasonable to me that they should take all their stakeholders seriously, not just their shareholders. If they can’t do that, then their claims to be ‘Scotland’s airline’ will ring hollow.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 11th June 2026. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.