Since being taken into public hands in 2019 Teesside Airport has had one primary goal – stop making a loss and become sustainable.

In the year to March it hit that goal, making a profit for the first time in more than a decade after years of taxpayers absorbing multi-million-pound losses.

The airport had failed to make money for the last 12 years and had not made a penny of profit since being taken into public ownership in 2019 until this year.

Read more: Teesside Airport hits first profit in 12 years - but 'significant challenges' remain

That was after Ben Houchen vowed to buy the airport from then owners Peel and save it from closure if he was elected Mayor.

It was then re-named from Durham Tees Valley Airport to Teesside International, but its future remained uncertain.

Successive losses of £13.8m, £11.8m and £9m followed during the Covid pandemic, before they last year fell to £2.26m, a significant recovery.

Meanwhile passenger numbers have increased year-on-year since a low of 37,000 in 2020 during the Covid lockdown, with more than 226,000 passengers using it in 2023. This summer is expected to be its busiest yet with numbers set to hit 300,000 by the end of the year.

Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen said the pandemic had been a “huge setback”.

He added: “It’s a huge setback for trying to get flights and we’re a little bit further behind than I would like on getting those new flights. That’s largely because of Covid. So while we’re back in profit we’re seeing with airlines they’re finding the supply chains aren’t able to deliver new aircraft which again is having an impact on the speed with which we can get new flights.”

The ten-year plan outlined in 2019 hoped passenger numbers would hit 1.4m by 2029, but Lord Houchen nor airport MD Phil Forster committed to hitting that figure during a press event on Tuesday (August 13).

But what was clear was that the airport’s future is not solely in people movement, with its commercial side hailed by bosses as the key to sustainability.

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Lord Houchen said: “I think given the journey we’ve been on people understand the nuances that it’s a balance between passengers, real estate development, business investment and that new plan will give us a more balanced projection.

“What that will naturally do is mean we won’t need as many passengers to maintain that sustainability, but that’s not going to dampen our ambition on trying to break that 1m passenger mark which would be the panacea for passengers that we’ve never seen before at Teesside Airport.”

Plans include a new business park, hangers, freight routes and solar farms.