The Airport Operator | Summer 2026
26 Jun 2026
Bristol Airport has submitted a planning application to allow an increase in its passenger numbers to 15m passengers a year.
Three weeks after the application was submitted to North Somerset Council at the end of March, the airport’s Chief Executive Officer, Dave Lees, announced that he will be stepping down later this year after eight years in the role.
Early in his period in office he said that the Covid pandemic had forced the airport to make some difficult decisions, including “a really challenging decision around making a third of our team members redundant”. Then post Covid “the business bounced back incredibly successfully. That has taken a real team effort and now we are at traffic levels nearly 25% above where we were in 2019, which is industry-leading in the UK”...
