Minutes of meetings between City of Doncaster Council staff and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) have revealed a significant discrepancy between the council’s internal expectations for Doncaster Sheffield Airport (DSA) and its messaging to the public.

During a meeting between council staff and the CAA on September 3, 2025, Doncaster Council proposed a timeline for when the CAA could make a decision on, and approve, the airport’s airspace, which would be needed for freight operations to return in full.

The timeline, published by the CAA on September 30, 2025, suggested a decision from the CAA on DSA’s airspace could be reached by Q4 (October – December) of 2026.

Despite this, six days after the September 3 meeting, the Mayor of Doncaster, Ros Jones, announced freight flights would return to DSA by Summer 2026, following the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) meeting which approved nearly £200m in funding for the project.

placeholder image — Doncaster Sheffield Airport

Mayor Jones’ projection was in-spite of the South Yorkshire Mayor, Oliver Coppard’s, estimate that freight would return in 2027, after the proposed timeline submitted by Doncaster Council to the CAA.

Jones and the council continued to stand-by the Summer 2026 projection until December 2025, when the Mayor said in an interview that “we don’t know” if freight would return at that point, due in-part to the pending CAA decision on airspace.

Upon enquiries by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), the CAA confirmed that DSA does not need its airspace to be re-instated for flights to commence. However, members of Mayor Jones’ team told the LDRS they believed they could only have one or two operators without full CAA approval – suggesting it would not be a full return of freight operations.

Airspace confirmation is crucial for an airport to safely manage the high volume of aviation traffic arriving to, departing from, and travelling around an airport.

Responding to the enquiries about the timeline discrepancies by the LDRS, a spokesperson for Mayor Jones said: “Freight operations can commence before full CAA approval… As we have said previously it will not be a case of going from zero to fully operational, it will of course be gradual.

“We have also stated previously that there are interdependencies that are largely out of our control including Airspace and Aerodrome Certification.

“We will of course keep timelines under review as we continue to work to fully reopen Doncaster Sheffield Airport. We will be bringing a report to Cabinet in the next couple of months to update and formalise the agreement made with the former leader of the Reform group as per the joint statement.”

Ahead of the full council meeting in November 2025, Mayor Jones and Councillor Guy Aston, who was Reform UK leader at the time, released a statement saying they were “in agreement” on the need for public borrowing to reopen DSA.

Mayor Jones and Cllr Aston also stated they agreed on a need for external private investment in DSA at the “most opportune time”.

The pair said the council would begin looking at the potential for private investment “within six months” of securing crucial licensing, airspace change process and aerodrome certifications from the CAA, starting with a “soft market test”.

Following LDRS enquiries, the CAA pushed the timeline for an airspace decision back even further, publishing their own timeline on January 6, 2025.

In this timeline, the CAA said it believed a decision on the airspace for DSA would be in May 2027. The organisation did not answer when the LDRS asked if the decision could be made sooner.