You’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone.

Scroll any social feed after a bank holiday and the complaints roll in.

One traveller’s post describing Edinburgh’s terminal as tired, dark, dirty and dated drew a chorus of agreement.

Business leaders have gone online to say that dozens of foreign airports put Edinburgh, and Glasgow too, to shame.

Glasgow has been branded an embarrassment on social media by passengers stuck for hours without transport home. Even Edinburgh’s own chief executive concedes the point: the arrivals hall, he admitted this year, is “very industrial and dated”.

The time has come, as this column’s namesake put it, to talk of many things. Today’s subject is runways.

Scotland should build one world-class airport midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and connect it to both cities by high-speed rail.

Two halves don’t make a hub

Just under 17 million people used Edinburgh Airport in 2025. Glasgow’s rolling total sits near 8.3 million, still a tenth short of its pre-pandemic level. Call it 25 million between them.

Now look at the neighbours. Dublin, serving a country our size, carried 36.4 million. Copenhagen managed 32.4 million and flies 49 routes beyond Europe. More than one in five of its passengers is only changing planes, so Denmark earns a living from other people’s journeys.

That’s what scale buys you. An airline weighing a daily flight to Singapore or San Francisco wants one deep catchment, not two shallow ones bidding against each other.

So we Scottish travellers change at Heathrow, Schiphol, Dubai and, yes, Dublin.

Getting to the terminal is no better. Glasgow’s rail link was axed in 2009, and the tram-train scheme that followed was abandoned too.

A 30-minute bullet train between the cities, promised for 2024, was quietly dropped.

Today’s fastest service takes 42 minutes, one minute better than British Rail offered half a century ago. 

The prize: visitors, jobs, growth

Here’s the part that should get us excited. The world already wants to come.

Overseas visitors made a record 4.4 million trips here in 2024. They left behind roughly £4 billion. That is more than half of everything tourists spend in Scotland.

We achieved that with a front door that needs a coat of paint. Imagine what we’d do with a proper one.

Every direct long-haul route is a tap we can turn on: American golfers, Asian students, European city-breakers who would rather not change in London.

They fill hotel beds in Oban, restaurant tables in Perth and distillery tours on Speyside.

A visitor who lands in the middle of the country is as close to Stirling and the Trossachs as to Princes Street.

It isn’t only tourism. Investors visit places they can reach. Exporters of whisky, salmon and life-sciences kit could ship from home instead of sending lorries south. And building the thing would put thousands of people to work for a decade.

One airport, one railway

Stop splitting the difference and build on it.

Put a single airport on the M8 corridor, a little over 20 miles from each city centre.

Two runways, one terminal, room for 40 million passengers. Call it what it would be: Scotland International Airport, the SIA.

Then run a high-speed line straight through it. Fifteen minutes to Glasgow. Fifteen to Edinburgh. About half an hour between the two.

That railway matters as much as the runways.

A graduate in Dennistoun could take a job in Leith without moving house.

Around 3.5 million of us would live in one labour market. Our two great cities would start pulling together instead of apart.

“Aye, but…”

It’ll cost a fortune. It will cost billions, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. But it needn’t all be our billions. Vinci paid £1.27 billion in 2024 for a controlling 50.01% stake in Edinburgh Airport. The money is out there looking for projects like this.

We’ve already got two airports. We have, and Edinburgh is about to sink more than £500 million into extending its terminal. That’s a lot to spend on a better version of the wrong answer. Bring both owners in as shareholders and turn the old sites into homes.

What about the climate? It’s the fair question. More flights mean more emissions. But one rail-served airport means fewer car journeys and fewer pointless hops through London. We’re going to keep flying. We can do it well or badly.

It’ll never happen here. That’s the objection with the most evidence behind it. It’s a habit, though, not a law of nature.

Over to ministers

Let’s do three things, none of them dear. 

Commission a proper feasibility study, with a deadline in months.

Protect a site and a rail corridor before they vanish under sheds.

Invite the investors in.

Small countries get rich by being easy to reach. The Danes and the Irish worked that out years ago. We’ve spent the same years moaning on social media about the baggage hall.

Let’s give Scotland something to boast about instead.