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Air Southwest was created in October 2003 by Sutton Harbour Holdings (which also owns Plymouth City Airport) when British Airways realised there was little money in flying to the West Country from London (at one stage it flew from Heathrow to Newquay, although that flight was moved to Gatwick in 2000). Air Southwest took over operations from BA the day it left the market, using their planes, crew, and equipment. For quite some time, planes few in BA colours, flying the Plymouth-Newquay-London Gatwick-Plymouth triangular route. It quickly took over the Plymouth-Bristol-Manchester route as well, extending it to Jersey as the UK's longest "milkrun".
 Air Southwest Dash 8 at Newquay |
Removing BA's large cost base gave the airline success with these routes, so it decided to try some other connections, flying from Newquay-Bristol-Leeds-Bradford, Newquay-Cardiff-Manchester (later routed via Bristol, and Cardiff was abandoned in 2007), and the first international route, to Dublin. However an experiment in 2007 from Bristol to Norwich was rapidly abandoned.
 Eastern Airways BAe Jetstream 41 at Newquay |
By 2006 the three daily flights from Newquay to Gatwick has expanded to five, and in 2007 Newquay was firmly established as the hub, with flights to Grenoble, Cork, Glasgow and Newcastle. In 2009 Plymouth-Guernsey was added. London City Airport even got a brief service in the summer of 2009 from Plymouth & Newquay.
However, with all this expansion, Newquay came within the sights of other airlines. Initially Ryanair had a go, flying 737s from Stansted which dwarfed Newquay (they abandoned the route in 2009), then BA had another go at taking over the route it had abandoned: this only lasted a year. Flybe got in on the act, and started offering very low fares from Gatwick to Newquay, with which Air Southwest couldn't compete, although with a far less regular or convenient service.
All this took place at a time of major changes for the airline. In May 2010 Sutton Harbour Holdings, sold Air South West Ltd to what was actually a smaller competitor, Eastern Airways, in December 2010.
The first major decision of the new owners was to pull what was the main trunk route from the West Country to London Gatwick on the February 1st 2011, bringing a sad end to a service that had been its mainstay for many years. The airline then transfered these aircraft onto an unusual route from Newquay to Aberdeen.