With the advent of cheap flights and increasing competition UK flight departures have seen an unprecedented growth.

With schools closing for the summer anxious parents and frantic bargain hunters add to this spiralling growth.

Regional airports like Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff are proving just as popular as their London counterparts and this is reflected by the sharp upward trend in pssenger numbers.

This growth in regional passenger traffic has attracted airlines such as RyanAir and EasyJet to expand their operations to cover these growth areas.

Lately passenger numbers have further increased as more and more people look for regional UK departures to offset the rising cost of fuel and other transportation. This of course works in favour of the regional airports who have gone to great lengths to entice the major airline and tour operators to offer UK wide flight departures.

Tour operators such as Thomas Cook in particular have been operating a widespread regional service for many years now. Many flight carriers such as Jet2, BmiBaby and XL Airways have been founded to bridge the gap in the local market and have already established strong footholds in various regions across the UK.

In the past airline and tour operators were guilty of an operational bias towards London flight departures by way of cheaper fares for departures from the capitol. . Although this bias does still persist, it is getting increasingly less so as the popularity of flight departures across the UK, continues to grow steadily.

Flight bookings online are now 'de rigeur' and as such it is relatively easy to find travel companies offering flight search engines that search through 100's of the top airlines and tour operators making it simpler to book through one source rather than having to visit each site individually.

Coupled with this fact, organisations such as The Department for Transport has recently approved new security arrangements at a number of airports in the UK. This now means that at these airports the restriction previously imposed limiting hand baggage to one item per person no longer applies.

It is always worth checking however, as airlines apply their own operational policies regarding the number of items of hand baggage which may be taken in to the aircraft cabin.

This growth in UK flight departures does not come without some alarm however. The use of 'green field site' for car parking, traffic congestion and the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and an extra 6 flights per hour on average in regional airports such as Bristol only add to the feeling of disquiet.

There is however, so much controversy and conflict over issues such as the contribution of air travel to climate change and its benefits to the economy that the debate will continue ad infinitum.

Broadly speaking, it does make both moral and financial sense to use regional airports where possible as there are some 30 airports across the UK serving some 22 million passengers each yer.

There is no escaping the fact that UK flight departures across the regions are set to grow at a phenomenal pace for the foreseeable future.