The flight between Papa Westray and Westray on a nine-passenger propeller plane costs only £18 ($25). Considering the cost of air travel, you have to wonder if this isn’t also the world’s cheapest commercial flight?
While on the world’s shortest commercial flight, Scott didn’t want to disturb his fellow passengers as he recorded himself talking through his mask, so he stuck to filming and had the very brief flight narrated by Sam Denby of Westover Productions. You can watch it here.
As Denby explains, the Orkney Archipelago is so sparsely populated that the name of the largest island, where most of the 22,000 Orkney residents live, is actually called “Mainland” — even though it’s an island. Papa Westray is one of the northernmost Orkney islands, far from Mainland.
Building bridges to connect these isles would be expensive. While ferries exist, Denby says, they are slow and impractical, so Logan Air is subsidized by the UK government as part of its “public services obligations.” So the $25 only pays for a small portion of Logan Air’s operating fees.
Moreover, the plane hits three islands in its “milk run” route, operating more like a bus. Passengers hoping to get from Papa Westray to Kirkwall on Mainland will first have to stop in Westray. Then again, when Scott was on the flight, the stop in Westray — where one passenger disembarked — took all of two minutes.
While $25 sounds like a lot for a bus, it sure seems like an efficient one. 