Villarreal to fly on charters from Aeroport Castellon?

Could it be that Spain's famous "airport without flights" is about to get busy at long last?  It may be so.  EPM reported that the airport has now done the necessary calibration of their radar and so forth to receive certification to operate, though the initial certification only is good Wednesday-Sunday, from 10AM to 6PM.

The Canadian company that obtained the license to operate the airport, SNC Lavalin, said charter flights could start as early as this weekend, with commerical flights hopefully following in March 2016.  Supposedly they are in serious negotiations with at least one UK low-cost airline to fly to Castellón.

And, Las Provincias is reporting one of the first charter flight customers is likely to be.....Villarreal CF!!  According to the paper, Villarreal plans to sign a contract with Lavalin to use the airport for charter flights "for all official functions".  This would make sense since at the moment Villarreal takes charter flights from Valencia's Manises airport, an hour's drive away.

In addition, the airport may be used to launch "nano-satellites"; a Barcelona company, Celestia Aerospace, considers the airport ideal as a base because of the lack of commercial traffic (!) and the company ultimately chose Castellon over other alternatives.  Whether they will ever achieve the rosy forecasts of 40 launches per year, and 40-50 employees on site, isn't known, and from the article here they appear to be searching for venture capital and clients, but the idea is intriguing.

By the way, Lavalin's passenger projections for 2015 are pretty modest--35,000--quite a change from the 2 million passengers per year originally projected. (To be fair, by 2012 the number was down to 300,000).

If you have started following Villarreal in the last few years, and want to get some background on the airport (who was a shirt sponsor from around 2004-2011) there's a pretty good article in English here (it is from 2012, so what you need to know beyond that is Fabra has just gone to jail for tax fraud).

Looking forward to the day when our UK supporters 9and those if us flying through the UK) can fly into Castellón.