when I got to Kirkwall on Wed evening I noticed a city local bus that would make a stop maybe 3 min walk from where I was staying (and bus fare of £1.80 was rather less than I was expecting to have to pay for a taxi)

took the bus back to the airport this morning, arriving ~0730 for the scheduled 0930 flight to Westray and Papa Westray, and discovered that a “day return” fare was only £3.25

Loganair has the same plane and pilot operating three “island-hopper” flights in fairly quick succession; when I was chatting with him in the coffee line (after he announced he would try the Westray trip out of sequence because the forecast looked better for one of the other islands), he mentioned that fully half of the pax on each flight were teachers who were likely to cancel their bookings if the delays got to be too long … the upshot of that was that the afternoon rotation would probably be a bit random, depending on how many people were booked on the return trips from each destination

long story short, my morning flight cancelled at 1130 and LM offered me a 1630 round-robin flight (Kirkwall-Papa Westray-Westray-Kirkwall)


topping off the Islander’s tanks before departure


initial climbout from Kirkwall


on the way to Papa Westray at 450 ft


lots of sheep near the PPW airfield


PPW airfield staff and embarking passengers (who had actually taken a morning ferry from Kirkwall after the 0930 was delayed)


about to touch down on return to KOI