Ryanair opens base at London Southend Airport

2 April 2019, 13:29 | Updated: 2 April 2019, 14:59

Ryanair officially opened its new base at London Southend Airport today.

There'll now be more than 60 extra flights a week on offer, to 14 destinations across Europe including Alicante, Corfu, Faro and Milan.

The partnership, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, has also created 750 jobs on site.

Glynn Jones, CEO of Stobart Aviation who own the airport, told Heart "most of the jobs have already been created but they continue to come through as the operation increases... What we want this airport to do, what it is already beginning to do, we want it to play a really big role in the regional economy. We know it can, we know it's starting to!"

Talking about how big the airport will get he added "5 million passengers by 2023, and then a ten million passenger plus airport. It's probably unrealistic to think it'll be a Gatwick type airport, that's getting on for 45/50 million passengers, so that's not the scale of our ambition, but nonetheless we can play a real role in London."