THE prospect of a regular seaplane service linking Bute with Glasgow and locations all over the west Highlands moved a step closer this week.
Loch Lomond Seaplanes, which plans to begin regular scheduled services in the new year, has received the green light from Glasgow City Council and the Civil Aviation Authority to use the River Clyde in the centre of the city as the start and fini
sh point for its flights.
The company intends to provide Britain's first commercial flying boat service for more than 50 years, and the only seaplane service in Europe to operate directly to and from a city centre.
Bute, Arran, Oban and Mull have already been identified as likely calling points for the company, which has been operating charter flights out of Loch Lomond for the last three years.
It won't be cheap - with tickets costing £110 to £185 for one of five charter flights a day operating between March and November - but Loch Lomond Seaplanes' founder, award-winning pilot David West, already has expansion plans in his mind.
"We want to open up the west coast, with a raft of destinations to be added over the next few months," Captain West said.
"I would really like to offer a service to Skye and possibly even Edinburgh - that would be a journey of little more than 15 minutes from the centre of Glasgow to the Water of Leith."
The new service will mark a return of seaplanes to the Clyde where, during the Second World War, almost three hundred Short Sunderland flying boats were built in a factory at Dumbarton Rock, mainly for use by the RAF. The last left the factory slipway in 1945.
The planned service may also bring back memories on Bute of the days of Burnthills Aviation, which offered a commercial helicopter service from Rothesay pier to destinations around Argyll in the early 1980s.
(This story was first published in the December 1, 2006 issue of The Buteman.)