St Helena Airport: What the NAO Audit Actually Says

The National Audit Office published its progress update on St Helena Airport on 12 February 2025. It runs to three parts and eight figures, and nowhere in it does the Comptroller and Auditor General suggest that aircraft cannot land on the island. The complaint is arithmetic. In 2023, 2,112 tourists arrived, against a business case that had projected roughly 8,000 for that year and 29,000 a year eventually. The airport failed its forecast, not its physics.

Silence Index — D-167

Genuinely remote

Ranks 52 of 99 scored dossiers — quieter than 48% of the others we have scored. A low score is not a warning; it describes who else will be standing next to you.

How the total is weighted. These are the fixed weights of the four inputs, the same on every dossier — not this place’s scores. We do not publish per-input bars, because the per-input values were never recorded article by article and inventing four plausible numbers that sum to the total would be a fabrication dressed as a chart.

Footfall pressure — visitors measured against the ground that absorbs them30%

Access friction — permits, caps, seasons, boats, weather windows30%

Acoustic floor — how close the nearest engine is20%

Unresolved questions — what the record still cannot settle20%

This dossier was scored before 2 September 2026, when the fourth input became night darkness. It keeps the input it was reasoned with until it is re-scored at its next source re-check; the methodology page records the change.

The index is a desk instrument scored by this publication, not a field measurement. How it is calculated, and where it fails.

What this dossier is built from

Nobody from this publication has been to St Helena. This is desk research, and it is unusually literal desk research: it is mostly one document, read from the first page to the last.

That document is Realising the benefits of St Helena Airport: a progress update, HC 676 of session 2024-25, prepared by the National Audit Office and laid before the House of Commons on 12 February 2025. Around it we have read its 2016 predecessor, HC 19; the Public Accounts Committee's report of December 2016; an Air Accidents Investigation Branch bulletin published in July 2026; the statistical bulletins of the St Helena Government's Statistics Office; the island government's own press releases from February 2026; Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office travel advice; and the GeoNames gazetteer for coordinates.

We are interested in what the audit counts, what it declines to count, and the two or three places where its own arithmetic does not quite close.

The document itself

HC 676 is a progress update, not a value-for-money report, and it says so. It does not audit the St Helena Government. It reaches no conclusion on whether the money was well spent. Fieldwork ran from October to December 2024. There are three parts — key developments since 2016, progress realising the expected benefits, and maximising the benefits — preceded by a summary and an introduction of a single, very efficient paragraph.

That paragraph is worth quoting because it does all the scene-setting the report permits itself. St Helena is "a small island of volcanic origin in the South Atlantic, 16° south of the equator". It is "1,300 kilometres from Ascension Island, its nearest landmass, and 1,900 kilometres west of Africa". It is "122 km2 in area, which is about a third of the size of the Isle of Wight". It has "a population of around 4,000, 29% of whom are aged 65 or over". Then the report gets on with it.

One absence is worth noting early. The 2016 report opened with a Key facts page: £285.5 million, 4,100 inhabitants, 29,208 tourists projected annually by 2042, 150 tourist beds, a net present value of £19.1 million against a benefit–cost ratio of 1.06, and 2043 as the year the subsidy would stop. The 2025 update has no Key facts page. Nothing was concealed; the numbers are all still in the text. But a reader who wants the headline figures of this project side by side must now assemble them, and the assembling is the argument.

Part One, and the sentence about aircraft

Part One is the chronology. Paragraph 1.2 gives the money in one line: "The budget for the project was £285.5 million but has so far cost £281.5 million." The runway came in under budget. This is not a fact that has travelled.

Paragraph 1.3 gives the certification sequence: an operating certificate on 10 May 2016, valid six months; re-certification on 26 October 2016 and again on 9 May 2017; open-ended air traffic certification on 25 October 2017; an aerodrome certificate in October 2018. The airport is Category C, meaning approaches are affected by turbulence and high ground, and pilots need specific training and experience — the report puts it alongside London City and Madeira. Paragraph 1.5 records £206,000 spent on LiDAR to measure wind and turbulence in real time, now near end of life, with about £1.5 million committed to replace it. Paragraph 1.6 records that extending the 1,550-metre runway and removing high ground were both assessed as prohibitively expensive.

Then paragraph 1.8, which is the sentence the whole popular story ought to have been built on: "The difficult weather conditions at the airport together with the island's remoteness and the relatively short runway length, reduces the types and capacity of aircraft that are commercially viable." Wind is not a scandal here. It is a variable in an aircraft-selection problem. Airlink flies a 98-seat jet where the business case had assumed 100 to 120 seats and Comair, the airline that withdrew in 2016, had planned on 160 to 170.

Paragraph 1.11 quantifies the weather. Between 2017 and 2024, 11% of all inbound flights to St Helena were delayed or cancelled and rescheduled. Across 2023 and 2024 the proportion rose to around 25%. That is a bad quarter of flights, in a place that has one scheduled arrival a week. It is not an airport that does not work.

What popular coverage gets wrong

The version in circulation is that Britain spent £285 million on the world's most useless airport, that nobody checked the wind, and that aeroplanes cannot land there. It survives in tabloid aviation coverage, in "worst airports in the world" video essays, and in engineering-fail listicles, and it is almost invariably sourced — at three or four removes — to reporting from April to December 2016.

The honest thing to say is that this claim has aged into a period piece. It was not invented by hacks. It came from Parliament. On 26 April 2016 the St Helena Government announced that further safety and operational work was needed before the airport could open, to address the impact of difficult wind conditions on landing the aircraft safely. On 13 December 2016 the Public Accounts Committee opened its report with the line: "The Department for International Development has spent £285.5m of taxpayers' money on building an airport in St Helena that is not usable by commercial airlines." The Committee's chair called it a white elephant. The Committee called it staggering that the wind had not been investigated, and noted that Charles Darwin had remarked on it in 1836.

Every word of that was true in December 2016. It stopped being true in October 2017, when Airlink began flying, and the sentence has been quietly false for nine years while continuing to circulate. The 2025 update's own verdict, in paragraph 18, is flatter and harder to sensationalise: "The airport is operational and is functioning as well as it can within the constraints on its operations."

So the interesting question is not whether the aircraft land. They land. The interesting question is what the auditor decided to measure instead, and the answer is that he measured the forecast.

Part Two: the arithmetic of a forecast

Part Two is where the report does its real work, and it does it almost entirely with counting.

Paragraph 2.2 records that in 2019, 2,481 tourists arrived, "in line with expected numbers in the business case for that year". This is easy to miss and important: for one year, before the pandemic, the airport hit its target. Paragraph 2.3 then records the position after Airlink's flights were suspended from March 2020 to March 2022: "In 2023, 2,112 tourists arrived, fewer than the pre-pandemic peak, and around a quarter of the approximately 8,000 for 2023 projected in the airport business case."

Figure 3 plots the two lines against each other, from NAO analysis of Statistics Office data. The actual series runs 1,582 in 2010, down through the 1,200s and 1,300s, up to 2,363 in 2018 and 2,481 in 2019, then 856, then 665, then 1,117, then 2,112. The business case projection runs 1,429, 1,818, 2,597, 4,026, 6,494, 7,013, 7,403, 8,052. The two lines share a starting point and then simply stop being about the same island.

Paragraph 3.2 supplies the terminal figure and the department's own verdict on it: FCDO acknowledges that the increase envisaged in the business case "to 29,000 tourists per year after 25 years of the airport being open was overly optimistic". For context the 2016 report noted, at paragraph 2.16, that actual tourist numbers between 2001 and 2011 had fluctuated between 750 and 1,000 a year. The forecast asked a place that had never seen a thousand visitors in a year to reach twenty-nine thousand.

The other counted things run the same way. Financial aid rose in real terms from £26.7 million in 2015-16 to £33.0 million in 2023-24, where the business case had it ending altogether in 2043. FCDO provided £240 million in aid between 2016-17 and 2023-24, about 60% of the island government's income in 2022-23. The resident population fell around 10%, from 4,504 in January 2016 to 4,023 in September 2024 — near the 3,961 of January 2010, before any of this was agreed. In the year to October 2024 there were 13 births and 47 deaths. The real-terms median wage fell from £10,270 in 2013-14 to £9,970 in 2022-23. Average flight occupancy between June 2023 and May 2024 was 53%.

The number that appears twice

Two things in HC 676 do not reconcile, and we are printing both rather than choosing.

Figure 3 splits its tourist series by nationality. For 2023 it gives 1,176 tourists of St Helenian nationality and 936 of other nationalities, which sums to the 2,112 of paragraph 2.3. For 2010 it gives 801 and 781, summing to 1,582. Paragraph 2.15, ten paragraphs later, is making a different and rather warmer point about the diaspora being able to come home more often, and it says: "In 2023, 2,112 St Helenians arrived on the island, compared with 1,452 in 2010."

The same figure, 2,112, is doing duty as the total in one place and as the St Helenian subtotal in another, and neither 1,452 nor 1,176 is the 801 that Figure 3 gives for 2010. It is possible that paragraph 2.15 is drawing on a different immigration series — all arriving St Helenians rather than those classified as tourists — and that both statements are true of their own data. The report does not say so. We could not resolve it, and it is the kind of thing that matters more than it looks, because the diaspora is the majority of the traffic. On Figure 3's own numbers, 56% of 2023's tourists were St Helenian nationals coming home. Paragraph 2.4 adds that St Helenian visitors spend about 60% of what foreign visitors spend. A tourism recovery that is mostly people visiting their mothers is a real social good and a thin commercial base, and the audit says the first part clearly and lets the reader do the second.

The wind, measured properly, arrives eighteen months later

HC 676 is thin on aerodynamics, which is proper: it is an audit of benefits, not of flight operations. The document that does the aerodynamics arrived on 16 July 2026, when the Air Accidents Investigation Branch published bulletin AAIB-29325 on an Embraer 190AR, registration ZS-YAD.

On 17 June 2023 that aircraft, with five crew and 28 passengers, made two go-arounds at St Helena and landed on the third attempt at 1329:41 with 5,600 kg of fuel remaining. On 10 September 2023 a sister aircraft inbound from Ascension made four go-arounds, held for about 25 minutes, and landed on the fifth attempt. The AAIB did not consider either event to meet the ICAO definition of a serious incident. It investigated anyway.

The bulletin gives the runway as 1,950 metres of concrete, aligned 01/19, at an elevation of 1,017 feet — which is worth holding next to the 1,550 metres that everyone, this publication included, quotes as the runway length. The St Helena Government's own 2021 explainer is precise about it: 1,550 metres is "the maximum landing distance available", not the length of the concrete. It quotes the Met Office: "The prevailing wind at St Helena is between east and south for 98% of the time", and the final approach path is "almost always, in the lee of King and Queen Rocks, resulting in terrain-induced wind shear and highly variable surface winds."

The AAIB's most quietly devastating line is not about wind at all. From its discussions, it reported, "there appeared a general acceptance that what might not be permitted elsewhere may be justified at St Helena, due to the conditions encountered and the experience of the crews flying there." Six safety recommendations followed, the last of them asking the Department for Transport to oversee a review of operations at the airport. Three years passed between the go-arounds and the bulletin. This is what actual scrutiny of the flying looks like, and it took a decade to arrive.

What actually stopped the aircraft

In February 2026 St Helena lost its commercial air service. It was not the wind.

On 6 February the St Helena Resilience Forum declared a National Major Incident, the Chief Secretary taking control as Gold Commander. The airport had been downgraded from rescue and firefighting Category 6 because of a "lack of confidence in the operational readiness of the fire tenders". On 10 February the regulator — Air Safety Support International — approved Category 4 operations, enough for medevac flights and small executive jets but, the government noted, "not a replacement for commercial services". The island government's closure Q&A of 17 February gives the cause: all three airport fire trucks had unserviceable water pumps from a common component failure across the fleet, found during annual maintenance in December 2025. Spare parts came from Germany. The major incident was stood down on 26 February.

An independent investigation by GBB UK Limited began on 27 July 2026, to establish why all three tenders developed the same fault within weeks of each other. Its announcement describes a downgrade "from Category 7 to Category 0" across 6–15 February; the March announcement describes a closure to commercial air services "between 5 and 17 February 2026"; February's own releases describe Category 6 falling to Category 4. We are not going to reconcile those, and we note that a government that cannot publish one date range and one category for a closure six months old is not a government whose tourism series should be read to the last digit.

The series goes dark

There is a final silence, and it is the one that will matter most to anyone trying to check the audit's arithmetic in future.

Every tourist number in HC 676 comes from the St Helena Government Statistics Office. In its arrivals bulletin of April 2025, that office noted that estimates of arrivals of St Helenians and of people arriving for leisure were not yet available from November 2024 onwards, "due to a change in immigration arrival procedures". By July 2025 the gap had shifted to January 2025 onwards. By 24 July 2026 the wording had changed and the gap had widened: no estimates from June 2025 onwards, "due to an ongoing technical issue in obtaining the latest data from the Immigration Service." Population estimates stop at June 2025 for the same reason, at a provisional 3,980 residents.

So the position, on the island's own record, is this. Gross arrivals are still counted — 5,298 in the twelve months to June 2025. Who they are and why they came is not. The one series the entire business case turns on has been unavailable for over a year, and the reason given has drifted from a procedural change to a technical fault. Meanwhile GDP for 2024/25 came in at £40.7 million, down 1.5% in real terms, and full-time employment stood at 1,472 people, down 23% on 2017/18 — the first full year of the airport.

Why the Silence Index is 74

Physical remoteness is close to the ceiling: 1,900 kilometres of ocean, one weekly aircraft, daylight operations only. Access friction, though, is low by our standards: there is a scheduled jet, and the entry permit is £20 in cash on arrival. Visitor volume is the input doing the heavy lifting: around two thousand tourists a year on an island of four thousand people, more than half of them coming home rather than sightseeing. The fourth input we have weighted is unresolved questions, and St Helena scores high on it for documentary rather than romantic reasons: an audit whose flagship number appears twice meaning two different things, a closure with three published category pairs and two published date ranges, and a visitor series that has gone dark. A working island with a capital town and a weekly flight does not score in the nineties. A working island whose own statistics office cannot currently say who is arriving scores in the mid-seventies.

What the audit is actually for

Read as a whole, HC 676 is a document about the difference between building a thing and being right about why you built it. The engineering worked, under budget. The certification worked, on the fourth attempt. The aircraft land, in eleven cases out of twelve across eight years, and on the fifth approach when they have to. What did not work was a spreadsheet approved in October 2011 that took an island which had never received a thousand visitors in a year and projected twenty-nine thousand, and then hung the end of a British subsidy on it.

The auditor's judgement, at paragraph 19, is that FCDO is now committed to reducing dependence on aid "without setting a target date for self-sufficiency". That sentence is the whole story. The target date was the entire point of the business case, and it has been removed rather than revised. The runway will outlast the forecast that justified it by several decades, which is the ordinary fate of infrastructure, and the only genuinely useless thing about St Helena Airport was the number somebody wrote next to it.

Corner Codex — D-167

Place: St Helena Airport, Prosperous Bay Plain, St Helena, South Atlantic
Coordinates: 15.96187°S, 5.64594°W (GeoNames, ICAO FHSH / IATA HLE)
Isolation: 1,900 km west of Africa; 1,300 km from Ascension, the nearest landmass
Island: 122 km², about a third of the Isle of Wight; population around 4,000
The document: NAO, HC 676 of session 2024-25, laid 12 February 2025
Project budget / outturn: £285.5m budgeted; £281.5m spent so far (HC 676, para 1.2)
Tourists, 2023: 2,112 — about a quarter of the roughly 8,000 the business case projected
Business case, year 25: 29,000 tourists a year. FCDO now calls this 'overly optimistic'
Weather disruption: 11% of inbound flights 2017–2024; around 25% across 2023 and 2024
Runway: 1,950 m of concrete (AAIB); 1,550 m maximum landing distance available (SHG)
Air service: Airlink, one 98-seat jet a week from Johannesburg, daylight only
Last closure: 5–17 February 2026 — fire tenders, not wind
Silence Index: 74 / 100

The Traveler's Panel · checked 24 August 2026

Changing information. Prices, permits, seasons and road access change, sometimes at short notice. Everything here is a starting point for your own confirmation — not a quote, and not a guarantee. Verify with the operator and the relevant official body before you book.

The famous claim	'Not usable by commercial airlines' — true when Parliament wrote it in December 2016
What actually happens	Airlink has flown a scheduled service since October 2017
The auditor's complaint	2,112 tourists in 2023 against roughly 8,000 projected for that year
Weather	11% of inbound flights delayed or cancelled 2017–2024; around 25% in 2023–24
Aircraft	One 98-seat jet weekly, daylight only, departures between 3pm and 4pm
Entry	Permit issued on arrival, £20 cash; medical evacuation cover of at least £175,000
Last closure	5–17 February 2026 — three fire tenders, one common component failure
Population	3,980 residents at June 2025, provisional; 29% aged over 65

Getting there — Johannesburg O.R. Tambo → St Helena (HLE), about six hours, one flight a week

There is one scheduled way in. Airlink flies from Johannesburg O.R. Tambo to St Helena once a week on a Saturday, a flight of about six hours, on an aircraft seating 98. A seasonal Cape Town service runs on Tuesdays from mid-December to mid-March, and a monthly service connects the island to Ascension. The schedule to March 2027 was published by the St Helena Government in November 2025, eighteen months ahead, precisely because nobody arrives here casually.
The airport works in daylight only, and the weather window is narrow. The island government's own explanation is that the optimum conditions are around lunchtime, and that departures are timed between three and four in the afternoon so that an aircraft which cannot land has somewhere to be before dark. Plan on the assumption that your flight is a fixture in a timetable with no redundancy: miss it, or have it cancelled, and the next one is seven days away.
Delays and cancellations are normal rather than exceptional. Across 2017 to 2024, 11% of inbound flights were delayed or cancelled and rescheduled; across 2023 and 2024 the figure was around a quarter. The airport's own website carries a standing notice directing passengers to the airline's local agent for postponements. Build slack into onward travel and expect to need it.
No visa is required, but an entry permit is. A short-term permit is valid for up to 183 days and can be obtained on arrival for £20, payable in cash in sterling, euros, US dollars or South African rand. You will need a return ticket or the funds to buy one, somewhere to stay, and a passport valid for six months beyond arrival.
The insurance requirement is the one that catches people. The FCDO states that you must hold medical insurance covering evacuation to a minimum of £175,000. This is not bureaucratic theatre: there are 87 recorded medical evacuation flights to South Africa since 2016, they cost around £50,000 each, and there is no hyperbaric chamber on the island, which matters because diving is one of the things people come for.

Indicative costs — verify before booking

Air fare	HC 676 recorded £375 to £735 each way as at November 2024. We do not quote a current fare, having found none from an official published tariff
Entry permit	£20, cash, on arrival — sterling, euros, US dollars or South African rand
Insurance	Medical cover including evacuation, £175,000 minimum, per FCDO advice
What the flight costs the taxpayer	The St Helena Government paid Airlink £807,000 in subsidy between June 2023 and May 2024, from ring-fenced UK aid
What the airport costs the taxpayer	About £3m a year in operating support; £29.4m provided by FCDO up to November 2024
Accommodation	Three hotels in Jamestown and 71 serviced rooms island-wide as at March 2024, down from 83 in 2019. We do not quote room rates

What to pack

Everything medical you might need. Treatment is charged for, the pharmacy stock is finite, and the nearest hospital capable of complex work is in South Africa, six hours away and once a week.
Printed proof of your return ticket, your accommodation booking and your insurance schedule showing the evacuation limit. The permit is granted on arrival on the strength of these.
Cash. The permit fee is cash-only, and the island's banking arrangements are not those of a European destination.
Clothing for wind. The Met Office's assessment, quoted by the AAIB, is that the prevailing wind is between east and south 98% of the time, and the island's terrain accelerates it.
Slack in your calendar. If you have a connection out of Johannesburg that cannot move, you have designed your trip against the one statistic in this dossier that is not disputed.

Where to stay

Almost all serviced accommodation is in or near Jamestown, the capital wedged into James Valley, and there is not much of it: three hotels in the town and 71 serviced rooms across the whole island as at March 2024, down from 83 in 2019. The audit is blunt about the consequence — periodic full occupancy limits the options for anyone booking late, and the St Helena Government names a shortage of hospitality workers and of serviced rooms as a constraint on tourism growth in its own right. The hotel built since the airport opened, the Mantis, provides roughly half of that serviced stock and trades at a loss the government covers, partly because demand is fiercely seasonal: the busiest month for foreign visitors in 2023 was February, with 133, and the quietest was October, with 20. Self-catering and guest houses fill the gap and are how most visitors actually stay. Book before you book the flight, which is the reverse of the usual order and is the correct order here, because the flight is weekly and the rooms are finite.

Safety & responsible travel

Do not repeat the line that aircraft cannot land here. It was Parliament's assessment in December 2016 and it has been out of date since October 2017. Saints have had nine years of reading that their island's airport is a joke, and the joke was always about a spreadsheet.
Be careful with the word tourist. On the audit's own figures more than half of 2023's arrivals were St Helenian nationals coming home, and they spend around 60% of what foreign visitors spend. A visitor here is not an anonymous unit of demand.
Book accommodation early and honour it. There are 71 serviced rooms on the whole island and the one hotel built since the airport opened runs at a loss the island government subsidises. A cancelled booking in a market this thin is not absorbed by anyone.
Take the marine protected area seriously. St Helena's entire exclusive economic zone — over 440,000 square kilometres — has been protected since 2016, and enforcement rests on a very small number of people.
Do not treat the cloud forest as scenery. The Peaks hold at least 250 species found almost nowhere else and recharge most of the island's fresh water. Stay on the paths.

Nearby, and quieter

The island is 122 square kilometres, about a third of the Isle of Wight, so nearby means everywhere. Jamestown sits in a gorge at 15°55′29″S, its Georgian main street running inland from the seafront and Jacob's Ladder climbing the valley wall. Longwood, at 765 people the largest settlement outside the capital, is where Napoleon spent his last six years and where the French state still maintains the house and the empty tomb. Diana's Peak, 818 metres, is the island's high point and the centre of the cloud forest that the UK has been funding through the Peaks National Park — at least 250 species found almost nowhere else, recharging most of the island's fresh water. Prosperous Bay Plain, the arid plateau the runway occupies, is a different island entirely from the green interior, which is part of why the airport looks so strange in photographs. And offshore, in every direction, is a marine protected area covering the whole exclusive economic zone: over 440,000 square kilometres, designated in 2016, with whale sharks passing through between December and March.

Getting there, in order

1Johannesburg O.R. Tambo
↓
2St Helena (HLE), about six hours, one flight a week

Each leg is a separate booking and a separate chance to be weathered out. Build spare days into the chain, not onto the end of it.

Where it is

St Helena Airport, Prosperous Bay Plain, St Helena · 15.9619°S 5.6459°W · Open in Google Maps · OpenStreetMap

Key locations

St Helena Airport (FHSH / HLE) — GeoNames; 1,950 m concrete runway 01/19 at 1,017 ft, per the AAIB bulletin
15.9619°S 5.6459°W
Prosperous Bay Plain — the plateau the runway occupies; GeoNames gives roughly 15°57′S 5°39′W
15.9500°S 5.6500°W
Prosperous Bay — the bay below the plain, on the island's windward east coast
15.9361°S 5.6481°W
Jamestown — capital, population 637; almost all the island's serviced rooms are here
15.9247°S 5.7181°W
James Valley — the gorge the capital is built inside
15.9333°S 5.7167°W
Longwood — population 765; Napoleon's residence and tomb, still French state property
15.9492°S 5.6856°W
Diana's Peak — 818 m, the island's high point and the centre of the cloud forest
15.9723°S 5.7001°W

Coordinates are for orientation and are accurate to roughly the width of the feature named, not to a doorway. Several of these points are inside protected areas or need a permit, a guide or a boat — read the access notes above before you plan a route to any of them.

Sources & further reading — checked 24 August 2026

National Audit Office — 'Realising the benefits of St Helena Airport: a progress update', HC 676, Session 2024-25 (12 February 2025). The primary document of this dossier. Para 1.2 gives a £285.5m budget against £281.5m spent; para 1.8 the wording on aircraft types; para 1.11 the 11% and 25% weather figures; para 2.3 the 2,112 tourists against roughly 8,000 projected; para 3.2 the 29,000-a-year forecast that FCDO now calls overly optimistic; para 18 that the airport 'is functioning as well as it can'
National Audit Office — report page, 'Realising the benefits of St Helena Airport: a progress update' (12 February 2025). The NAO's own framing: the airport is operational but has not delivered the tourism growth or aid reduction expected; associated infrastructure is incomplete nine years past its deadline at double the cost; and FCDO needs to work with the St Helena Government on new projections
National Audit Office — press release, 'FCDO's £285 million investment in St Helena Airport has not yet achieved expected benefits' (12 February 2025). The headline figures as the NAO chose to publicise them: 2,112 visitors in 2023 against an 8,000 target, an 11% average delay rate, £807,000 of airline subsidy in a year, £78m spent on the bulk fuel installation against a £31m budget, and aid rising from £27m to £33m
National Audit Office — 'Realising the benefits of the St Helena Airport project', HC 19, Session 2016-17 (amended PDF). The predecessor report. Its Key facts page: £285.5m, 4,100 inhabitants, 29,208 tourists projected annually by 2042, 150 tourist beds, £246m avoided cost of replacing the RMS, £19.1m net present value at a 1.06 benefit–cost ratio, and 2043 as the year subsidy would end. Para 1.7 forecasts £295.2m; para 1.8 records the 26 April 2016 announcement; para 2.16 gives 750–1,000 tourists a year across 2001–2011
National Audit Office — press release, 'Realising the benefits of the St Helena Airport project' (9 June 2016). Amyas Morse on the postponed May 2016 opening; the cost–benefit model's sensitivity to tourist spending of £195 a day versus £82 a day; and the department underwriting the air service for three years with a maximum first-year liability of £1.9m
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts — 'St Helena Airport', HC 767, Session 2016-17, Summary (13 December 2016). The origin sentence of the popular story, in Parliament's own words: the Department 'has spent £285.5m of taxpayers' money on building an airport in St Helena that is not usable by commercial airlines', and the reference to difficult wind conditions on landing commercial aircraft safely
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts — 'St Helena Airport', HC 767, Conclusions and recommendations. The five recommendations: that it was 'staggering' the airport was completed before wind conditions were investigated; that the Department lacked technical resources; that remedial cost was undetermined; that the Committee was 'extremely sceptical' about the tourism projections; and that reputational damage could deter investment
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts — 'St Helena Airport', HC 767, contents. Establishes the report's identity and date — Thirteenth Report of Session 2016-17, HC 767, published 13 December 2016 — used here to date the claim that the airport was unusable
UK Parliament, Committee of Public Accounts — news release, '£285 million airport fiasco has unquestionably failed British taxpayers' (14 December 2016). Meg Hillier's 'a £285m white elephant serves neither its people nor the taxpayers footing the bill'; the Committee finding it staggering that wind shear was not anticipated; the observation that Charles Darwin remarked on the island's winds in 1836; and the charge that the Department was evasive about accountability
Air Accidents Investigation Branch — Bulletin AAIB-29325, Embraer 190AR ZS-YAD, St Helena Airport, 17 June 2023 (published 16 July 2026). The aerodynamic record HC 676 does not contain: two go-arounds on 17 June 2023 with 5 crew and 28 passengers, landing on the third attempt; four go-arounds and a 25-minute hold on 10 September 2023, landing on the fifth; a 1,950 m concrete runway 01/19 at 1,017 ft; the Met Office's '98% of the time' wind statement and terrain-induced shear in the lee of King and Queen Rocks; the finding of 'a general acceptance that what might not be permitted elsewhere may be justified at St Helena'; and six safety recommendations, 2026-007 to 2026-012
Air Accidents Investigation Branch — 'Anniversary statement: St Helena Airport' (17 June 2025). The AAIB confirming a year after the June 2023 events that they did not constitute serious incidents as defined, but that actions might improve safety, including possible enhancements to runway marking, weather reporting and diversion procedures — the investigation then took another thirteen months to report
St Helena Government — 'Aviation on St Helena: why is it difficult to fly to St Helena?' (29 September 2021). The island government's own explanation: a maximum landing distance available of 1,550 m (5,084 ft) rather than a 1,550 m runway; daylight operations only, with departures between 3pm and 4pm; an optimum weather window around lunchtime; ETOPS approval costing up to $1m per aircraft; and Category C status requiring simulator training for experienced captains
St Helena Government — 'St Helena Resilience Forum Declares National Major Incident' (6 February 2026). The declaration of a National Major Incident with the Chief Secretary as Gold Commander, following the airport's downgrade from rescue and firefighting Category 6 because of a lack of confidence in the operational readiness of the fire tenders, and the cancellation of all Airlink flights until at least 20 February
St Helena Government — 'Update on St Helena Airport Operations and Restoration of Services' (10 February 2026). The regulator granting Category 4 approval, sufficient for medevac flights and small executive jets but explicitly 'not a replacement for commercial services'; flights of 7, 10, 14 and 15 February cancelled; spare parts sought from Germany and two new fire appliances sought with potential UK Government support; Gold Command meeting daily
St Helena Government — 'Airport Closure Q&A', version 5.0 (17 February 2026). The mechanical cause: all three airport fire trucks with unserviceable water pumps from a common component failure across the fleet, discovered during annual maintenance in December 2025; Air Safety Support International named as the regulator issuing the Overseas Territories Aviation Requirements; and confirmation that medevac flights continued under Category 4
St Helena Government — 'Airport Operations: Major Incident Stood Down' (26 February 2026). The major incident stood down on 26 February 2026 with all three fire tenders returned to service and two new appliances ordered for delivery early in the new financial year; Chief Secretary and Gold Commander Ian Todd named
St Helena Government — 'Independent Investigation into the Closure of St Helena Airport (February 2026)' (20 March 2026). The announcement of an investigation into the closure to commercial air services 'between 5 and 17 February 2026', and the central question of why all three fire tenders developed similar faults within weeks of each other — one of the two date ranges this dossier prints side by side
St Helena Government — 'Independent Investigation Launched into St Helena Airport February Closure' (27 July 2026). GBB UK Limited appointed, with Dr Ross Beesley arriving on island on 27 July 2026; the investigation to determine technical root causes and systemic weaknesses; and this release's description of the closure as running 6–15 February with a downgrade 'from Category 7 to Category 0' — the second date range and category pair
St Helena Government — 'Airlink Flight Schedule to March 2027 Announced' (6 November 2025). The eighteen-month schedule: a weekly Saturday service from Johannesburg, a monthly service to Ascension, and a seasonal Tuesday Cape Town service from mid-December 2026 to mid-March 2027, with quotes from Minister Karl Thrower and Airlink's Katherine Whelan
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Arrivals and Departures' (28 April 2025). 4,774 arrivals in the twelve months to February 2025, up 7.9%; 480 of February 2025's 656 arrivals by air; and the first version of the data-gap note: estimates of St Helenian and leisure arrivals unavailable from November 2024 onwards, due to a change in immigration arrival procedures
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Arrivals and Departures' (30 July 2025). 5,298 arrivals and 5,261 departures in the twelve months to June 2025, arrivals up 22%; and the data gap now running from January 2025 onwards, still attributed to a change in immigration arrival procedures
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Arrivals and Departures' (24 July 2026). Data to the end of November 2025, and the note this dossier turns on: estimates of arrivals of St Helenians and of those arriving for leisure not available from June 2025 onwards, 'due to an ongoing technical issue in obtaining the latest data from the Immigration Service'
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Population' (30 July 2025). A resident population of 3,941 at the end of December 2024 with 4,514 people on island including 573 visitors; 487 residents under 15 against 1,155 aged 65 or over; and the working-age population falling from 2,434 to 2,299 in a single year
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Population' (24 July 2026). A provisional resident population of 3,980 at June 2025, and the Statistics Office stating it is 'not currently able to issue estimates for more recent periods' because of the ongoing problem obtaining Immigration Service data
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Gross Domestic Product 2024/25' (23 July 2026). GDP at market prices of £40.7m for 2024/25, a real-terms fall of 1.5%; GDP per capita of £9,660 on an average on-island population of 4,212; and public administration, finance, health and retail together making up 63.6% of value added
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'Statistical Update: Employment and Incomes 2024/25' (13 April 2026). A median full-time wage of £11,250 in 2024/25, 2.2% above the previous year; a lower quartile of £9,240 and an upper of £14,920; and an estimated 1,472 people in full-time employment, a fall of 23% compared with 2017/18 — the airport's first full year
St Helena Government Statistics Office — 'St Helena 2021 Population & Housing Census: Main Report'. The census of 7 February 2021: 4,439 residents including 4,118 St Helenians; a median age of 51.4, about four years higher than 2016, with more than half the St Helenian population over 50; 82.1% of residents born on the island; and 1,937 occupied dwellings
St Helena Government Statistics Office — statistics resources index. The catalogue of the island's statistical output — population, arrivals and departures, GDP, external trade, inflation, wages and incomes — used here to establish what is published, how often, and where the current series stop
St Helena Government — 'St Helena Cloud Forest Project Update' (6 May 2022). £1 million of UK Government funding committed for a second year of cloud forest restoration in the Peaks National Park, and at least 250 unique species found entirely or almost entirely within the cloud forest, which recharges the majority of the island's fresh water
UK Government, Blue Belt Programme — 'Get to know the UK Overseas Territories within the Blue Belt Programme'. St Helena's marine protected area, established in 2016 and covering over 440,000 square kilometres — the island's entire exclusive economic zone — designated as a sustainable-use MPA protecting whale sharks and endemic species
Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office — St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha travel advice: entry requirements (updated 7 July 2026). The entry permit requirement — short-term permits valid up to 183 days, obtainable on arrival for £20 in cash — together with the requirement for a return ticket, accommodation, sufficient funds, six months' passport validity, and medical insurance covering evacuation to a minimum of £175,000
Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office — St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha travel advice: health (updated 7 July 2026). An adequate standard of medical care with charges for treatment, and the absence of any hyperbaric chamber on the island — relevant because diving is one of the tourism products the audit is counting on
St Helena Airport — official website. The operator's public face: Airlink as the sole airline, a published flight schedule from May 2025 to October 2026, and a standing notice directing passengers to Solomons Shipping and Travel for flight postponements — the airport's own acknowledgement that postponement is routine business
St Helena Airport — aeronautical information page. Cited for what it does not hold: the airport publishes no AIP, charts or aeronautical information circulars on its own site, referring pilots instead to the South African ATNS website, which is why this dossier takes runway data from the AAIB bulletin
GeoNames gazetteer — Saint Helena Airport. The airport at 15.96187°S, 5.64594°W, carrying the ICAO identifier FHSH — the coordinate used for the map centre and the airport pin in this dossier's panel
GeoNames gazetteer — Jamestown, St Helena. Jamestown, capital, at 15°55′29″S 5°43′05″W with a population of 637, plus James Valley at roughly 15°56′S 5°43′W — the gorge the capital is built inside
GeoNames gazetteer — Longwood, St Helena. Longwood as a populated place at 15°56′57″S 5°41′08″W, population 765, with Longwood Plain and the Old and New Longwood buildings recorded separately at roughly 15°57′S 5°41′W
GeoNames gazetteer — Prosperous Bay, St Helena. Prosperous Bay Plain, the plateau the runway occupies, at roughly 15°57′S 5°39′W, and Prosperous Bay itself at 15°56′10″S 5°38′53″W
GeoNames gazetteer — Diana's Peak, St Helena. Diana's Peak at 15.972288°S, 5.700078°W, elevation 818 metres — the island's high point and the centre of the cloud forest the UK is funding

Official and scientific bodies are the authority for safety, regulatory and scientific claims. Commercial operators are used only for practical detail such as tour length, meeting points and indicative pricing — never for a safety or scientific statement.

How this was made

Desk research. Compiled from official bodies, scientific and conservation sources, established journalism and licensed operators. Not based on a personal visit.

Editor’s method note — what we checked, corrected and could not verify

Desk research only. Nobody from this publication has been to St Helena, and this dossier makes no claim to have seen the airport, the runway or the island.
This is a single-document dossier. Its spine is the National Audit Office's progress update, HC 676 of session 2024-25, laid on 12 February 2025, read in full. Where we quote it we give the paragraph number so that any reader can check us against the PDF.
Every URL cited was opened and read before citation. Sources that could not be opened are listed at the end of this note and are not cited anywhere in the piece.
We do not say anywhere in our own voice that aircraft cannot land at St Helena, because no document we opened says it. The Public Accounts Committee said the airport was 'not usable by commercial airlines' on 13 December 2016, before the air service began, and we quote it with that date attached. The 2025 update's own verdict, at paragraph 18, is that the airport is operational and functioning as well as it can within its constraints.
The runway length is given two ways by two official sources and we print both. The AAIB bulletin of July 2026 describes 1,950 metres of concrete aligned 01/19. The St Helena Government's 2021 explainer gives 1,550 metres as the maximum landing distance available, and HC 676 refers to a 1,550-metre runway. These are different quantities, not a contradiction, but the 1,550 figure is the one that has entered general circulation as the runway length.
We flag rather than resolve an internal inconsistency in HC 676. Figure 3 gives 2,112 as the total number of tourists in 2023, split 1,176 St Helenian and 936 other, and gives 1,582 for 2010, split 801 and 781. Paragraph 2.15 says 2,112 St Helenians arrived in 2023 compared with 1,452 in 2010. The same number is used for a total in one place and a subtotal in another, and neither 2010 figure matches. It may be that paragraph 2.15 draws on a wider immigration series than the tourism series behind Figure 3. The report does not say, and we did not resolve it.
Similarly, the St Helena Government has published two date ranges and three category descriptions for the February 2026 airport closure — 5 to 17 February in its March 2026 announcement, 6 to 15 February in its July 2026 announcement, a downgrade from Category 6 to Category 4 in its February releases, and a downgrade from Category 7 to Category 0 in July. We print all of them and name the release each came from rather than choosing between them.
Percentages, tourist totals, aid figures, population figures, wages and GDP are quoted from the source that published them and are not recalculated by us, with two exceptions we flag in the body: the observation that 1,176 of 2023's 2,112 tourists is 56%, and the observation that 11% of flights delayed or cancelled means eleven in every hundred. Both are our arithmetic on figures printed in HC 676.
Coordinates come from the GeoNames gazetteer. We could not obtain the official Aeronautical Information Publication for St Helena: the airport's own aeronautical page refers pilots to the South African ATNS website, which we did not reach, so declared distances for each runway direction are absent from this dossier.
Sources we could not read, and therefore did not cite: the St Helena Statistics Office's Excel data files behind the arrivals, population and GDP bulletins, which are downloads rather than pages and which we could not open; the ATNS aeronautical information publication for FHSH; the 'St Helena in Figures' and 'State of the Nation' PDFs, whose landing page carries no figures; and Airlink's own fare and schedule pages. Direct file retrieval from this workstation was blocked at the network layer for every host, so everything here was read through a fetching proxy; where that proxy returned a summary rather than a transcription we ran the same document again with a differently worded request and used only what both passes agreed on.
Things we could not verify: whether paragraph 2.15 of HC 676 and its own Figure 3 are drawing on the same series, or whether one of them contains an error; the true date range of the February 2026 closure, the island government having published two; which rescue and firefighting categories were actually in force during it, three having been published; how many tourists have visited St Helena since June 2025, the Statistics Office being unable to publish the series; the current resident population, the June 2025 figure of 3,980 being provisional and slightly above the 3,941 published for December 2024, which we cannot reconcile; the publication date of the 2016 NAO report, the press release giving 9 June 2016 and the amended PDF we read giving 7 July 2016; whether the GBB UK investigation into the airport closure has reported, as no findings were published at the time of writing; current air fares, the £375 to £735 range being HC 676's figure for November 2024; and whether FCDO has yet published the revised tourist projections for 2025 and beyond that HC 676 says it will produce.

AI is used to draft this text, and a human checks it. Every figure, date and quotation above was verified by Tony Hall against the source cited for it in the reference list; where sources disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved, and where a claim could not be confirmed it is either marked unverified or left out. The illustrations are AI-created and labelled as such — no photograph on this site is presented as a record of a real place. Full disclosure · Editorial policy.

Access details change — recheck before you travel. Found an error? Tell us — corrections are dated and shown in place.

A Quarter of Eight Thousand: Reading the St Helena Airport Audit