It's losing £60,000-£70,000 a year, it has one daily service to London and when duty-free sales are abolished this summer it will be in deeper trouble than ever. What's to be done with Waterford Regional Airport?
A substantial cash injection from the State would secure the airport's future and, far from being money down the drain, would be a far-sighted investment in the south-east region, the airport's supporters say.
Critics, however, claim the airport can never properly serve the region because it is in the wrong place, on a minor road south of Waterford. They say the region should cut its losses, shut the airport and build a new one in a location accessible to everyone in the south-east.
One of the most outspoken critics is the airport's former managing director, Mr Christy Ryan, who claims "parish-pump politics" is responsible for keeping the airport where it is.
The Fianna Fail Wexford TD, Mr John Browne, also created ripples at a recent meeting of the South East Regional Authority when he suggested Slieverue, north of Waterford, would be a better location.
Mr Peter Tawse, the airport's manager, has heard the arguments before, but he says it would make much more sense to improve the access routes to the airport than to uproot it.
Almost all Ireland's airports are on the coast, he points out. "If we were to approach it logically, we should have one major airport in the midlands, connected with motorways and rail. People who talk about relocation are missing the point. Air travel today is about reliability and decent service connections to the airport."
Mr Tawse says Waterford Airport, which receives £40,000 annually in marketing support from the State, needs an annual grant of £350,000 for the next few years.
This would match the level of investment in other regional airports for domestic services, and would fund a daily return service to Britain. He says substantial support is needed to help airports attract new carriers which insist, not only that there be no landing charges, but that the airports carry some of the cost of marketing new services.
While some might claim giving more money to the airport would be throwing good money after bad, Mr Tawse argues that increased investment would be cost-effective.
"The regional airports are a business tool for the regional economy and it's unrealistic to expect them to be stand-alone businesses."
He adds that in 1990, in the days when Ryanair operated services from Waterford, the airport handled 45,000 passengers a year compared with 18,000 today. This, he suggests, proves that if the services are available, the airport's accessibility is not a problem.
Mr Ryan, however, says that in its busier days 52 per cent of the passengers were from Waterford, which shows that even then the airport was not seen as a facility for the entire region. He claims a truly regional airport, in the right location, could attract up to a million passengers a year.
He argues that the first thing the airport needs is a jet runway. It can currently cater only for turbo-prop aircraft, which are much more expensive to operate on a cost-per-passenger basis.
Investing the £15 million it would cost to build a new runway would be a mistake, he says, considering the massive investment in infrastructure which would also be needed to make the airport accessible to people from outside Waterford.
Instead, he believes, it would make more sense to spend £25 million to build a new airport in south Kilkenny. The reason this hasn't happened "comes down to politics", he says: "People in Waterford just don't want to know [about a new location]."
Mr Browne says that just because he suggested a south Kilkenny location for the airport does not mean he is indulging in parish-pump politics.
"We're getting very little industry into the south-east, particularly the Wexford area, and business people constantly tell me that the lack of an airport is a major problem . . . I think the Government has shown no interest in it because of where it is."
