The airline Manx2.com is applying for slots at Heathrow Airport, to run a three times a day service from the Isle of Man, which they say will start as soon as possible.

The airline has been running an online route survey on its website for the last three weeks and say that out of 1,212 individual entries the majority of respondents selected Heathrow as their preferred destination. They were asked to select which airport in the UK, with options in Europe as well, to which they would like either a completely new, or just more frequent, service from the Isle of Man. In order, the top three choices were Heathrow, Paris and Liverpool.

They say " getting slots at Heathrow is known to be difficult", but Manx2.com will be making the argument that the Isle of Man’s status as a crown dependency means it should get a special exemption from the normal slot allocation process.