For those who enjoy watching the planes take off and land from Leeds Bradford Airport, there is one type of plane that rather stands out as it is one of the few propeller planes that you see taking off from the airport. Most of these belong to Flybe.

From Leeds, Flybe are essentially a gateway to Belfast, Newquay, Southampton and more recently Düsseldorf, although they do offer a range of indirect flights around the UK and Leeds-based folk can choose to head to Manchester or Birmingham to go to a wider number of destinations. For us, our journey was to a fabulous Airbnb accommodation near Newquay in Cornwall.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of their flights is that they don’t challenge the BA route to London as they could introduce a Gatwick or London City route that would go a long way towards helping to supplement or even enhance the connections between the two cities. The reason this might be the case is answered by the fact you can get avios points travelling with them, suggesting that they may not want to sour their relationship with BA, especially since Flybe don’t exactly make a fortune from their routes.

In terms of flying experience, we travelled with a toddler (who was still under two) and hand luggage (foolishly choosing not to take a car seat and getting stuck for a length of time at the Newquay Europcar as a result) and this was easy to do, but we would advise you check these dimensions before you choose to not check in a bag as Flybe do offer one of the smaller cabin bag allowances and these were being strongly enforced.

The in-flight experience was what you might expect, with a relatively quiet cabin, a good range of decent in-flight snacks to buy (at an inflated but not ridiculous cost) as well as enough space to sit so that you don’t feel too squished in what appears from the outside at least to be a tiny pencil shaped plane!

Overall, we were impressed by the service. The route to Newquay knocked many, many hours off compared to driving or taking the train and it was good value, coming in at under £80 for the three of us to travel. We would certainly consider using them again to travel to Newquay or elsewhere in the UK.