Virgin Atlantic are running a full day course at Leeds Bradford Airport in order to help travellers beat their fear of travelling by plane. The company’s Flying Without Fear programme includes a real flight on a commercial aircraft, lasting about 45 minutes. The course looks to take an informative approach with practical activities, focusing around flying facts and developing methods to help passengers keep calm before a journey.

Aviation Development Director for Leeds Bradford Airport, Tony Hallwood said:

“It’s fantastic to see this course return to LBA again in 2017 and we are proud to be working with Virgin Atlantic to ensure that everyone has a successful day. Our operations team will look forward to welcoming all of the course attendees so they have the best experience possible. “One of our customer service team members, who is afraid of flying, will also be on the course. She will use the knowledge she learns on the day in her job - reassuring passengers travelling through LBA who may be anxious ahead of their flight.”

The course is not only attracting members of the public; a member of the Leeds Bradford Airport staff has booked herself into the February courses to beat her phobia of flying.

The ‘Flying Without Fear’ course has been running since 1997, and its highly acclaimed status amplifies the fact that it’s the best course available in the aviation industry helping 2-3,000 people every year. The course so far has helped men and women from the age of 4 all the way to the age of 87, with an impressive 98% success rate! Severity of phobias that have been aided range from mild anxiety cases to full phobia.

Richard Conway, Director of Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Without Fear programme, said: “We are delighted to be able to bring another one of our Virgin Atlantic Flying Without Fear courses to Leeds Bradford Airport. Leeds is such a fantastic location and our past courses have always been well received.”

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...As the day Leeds saw 6cm of the first winter snow and had to close the airport overnight!

Thankfully, the efforts of the gritters and ploughs meant that the airport reopened around 9am. The weather has caused 2 flights (one of the destinations being Dublin) to be cancelled as well as various delays on arrival and departure flights.

The area of Leeds, more specifically surrounding the cross-Pennine length of the M62, was hit with with a bout of snow which caused a number of minor accidents resulting in dramatically slowed traffic.

The winter schedule from Ryanair has been extended recently at Leeds Bradford Airport. Flights from the budget airline giant will travel to Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia, and Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. This is in addition to the recently added destinations of Faro, Alicante, Krakow, Lanzarote and Tenerife and Gran Canaria and Warsaw, Poland (the last pair being on a 2 a week basis.) The overall additions to Leeds Bradford Airport has risen to 15 new routes with 51 new weekly flights.

The owners of Leisure Airline and Jet2.com, based over at the Yeadon Hub, have recently opened over 100 temporary staff positions at Leeds Bradford Airport. In addition to this, they also aim to open 500 more seasonal staff roles for the summer of 2016 across their seven UK Northern bases, as well as several of their European destinations. Along with its neighbouring package service JEt2Holidays, the airline have been aiming to fill roles for it’s 50 holiday destinations which include; Passenger service agents, cabin crew members, baggage handlers and overseas based holiday reps. HR are expected to be swarmed with applications.

There was good news for Leeds Bradford Airport a few days ago with the announcement that passenger numbers were up and losses down from last year.

Passenger numbers increased by 11% to 3.3 million and this in turn led to increased revenue for the airport in the shape of parking charges and retail income from shops and restaurants.