St Helena’s Uk-funded airport finally opens

The long-awaited first scheduled airline service to St Helena will touch down today now that SA Airlink has launched weekly flights from Johannesburg, South Africa, to the remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic.

St Helena Airport, built with £285million of funding from the Department for International Development, was due to open last year but the launch of commercial flights was delayed because of dangerous wind conditions.

A damning report by MPS published last December found that the airport project “unquestionably failed” the British taxpayer.