THERE is a pause followed by muted laughter when Jonathan Hinkles is asked why he took on the role of managing director at “beleaguered” Scottish airline Loganair.

Beset by operational and punctuality issues, profits were falling and the First Minister had publicly revealed her concerns over Loganair’s ability to service its passengers in remote Scottish communities.

“I was aware of where things were,” says Mr Hinkles – who moved from his role as vice president operations and crewing at Virgin Atlantic at the end of June. “Early this year I was asked if I would like to participate in the selection process. I was fairly non-committal, but it moved from there.”

Mr Hinkles had previously served as chief operating officer at Loganair, before moving to Virgin for four years.

“I like Virgin, I like the people, but the point I’m making is that at Loganair there was clearly a job to do, and it’s an operation I knew could and should work well, and I enjoyed very much in my previous time at the airline,” he says. “There was a defined ability to make a very visible difference and get the airline to where it needed to be.”

Less than six months later and things are markedly improving. Punctuality – flights landing within 15 minutes of their scheduled slot – was at 89 per cent in October, 20 percentage points ahead of last year.

This is had been made possible by beginning to overcome a shortage of skilled aviation engineers, and rebuilding shaken confidence among the 600-strong workforce.

“There was a lot of work to do to build confidence,” says Mr Hinkles. “It was a two point challenge, one of which is customer confidence in the airline and its service delivery after a pretty torrid run of operational issues, and the second is about rebuilding the confidence in our team that they have the capacity to deliver.”

He called the last year of media coverage, “pretty demoralising,” saying: “It went from being ‘Loganair, Scotland’s airline’, to ‘beleaguered airline, Loganair’.”

Then, just as plans were progressing smoothly, the airline opted not to sign a franchise extension with Flybe, with whom it has operated under since 2007.

“The working assumption all the way through [talks] was that we would renew the franchise if the terms on the table to do so were acceptable,” he says. “They weren’t and we didn’t.”

And so Loganair heads into 2017 ready to fly under its own banner for the first time since it signed a franchise deal with BA in 1993.

“The more we looked at the option of going independent the more we were attracted by what we saw,” says Mr Hinkles.

A new schedule has been unveiled that Mr Hinkles said was a “statement of intent” as Loganair prepared for a new chapter in its long history.

In addition to retaining services previously operated under the franchise agreement, new routes have been launched including Stornoway to Manchester, and Shetland and Aberdeen to Vagar in Faroe Islands. A twice-weekly service from Glasgow to Bergen in Norway will also launch.

“Where the exchange rate has gone after Brexit, which frankly is another big challenge that airlines face today, it should be good news for incoming tourism – shopping, eating, drinking trips will prove pretty popular out of Norway into Glasgow,” he says.

Revenue at the business for the year ending March 31 was £95.3 million as pre-tax profits halved to £3.6m.

Mr Hinkles says revenue will pass £100m this year as new commercial contracts supplement its consumer offer. These already include services for oil and gas companies, and Royal Mail.

An education campaign to highlight that Loganair will be flying independently from September 1 will begin in earnest towards the end of March, while a number of new staff will be hired in Glasgow to take over back office duties that were carried out previously by Flybe.

A £15m investment plan is underway and in addition to growing the 28-strong fleet, aircraft will begin to be replaced, but not until around five years from now.

“A lot of talk about new aircraft came up when the issues were happening last year and became conflated, wrongly,” he says. “The issues last year were around the loss of personnel to support the fleet and organisational elements that we’ve put fixes in place to resolve. It doesn’t automatically follow that old airplane means unreliable and new airplane means good.”

That team of engineers is “broadly back to full strength”, he says. But adds: “It takes a tremendous amount of time to train an engineer on a specific type of airplane. The lead time is a minimum of six months but more realistically it takes 18 months to train an experienced engineer in all the functions of a different aircraft.”

Mr Hinkles says he is “genuinely pleased” with where the airline is today.

The improvements in reliability would indicate that Loganair is getting where it needs to be, which has allowed him to look at the macro challenges impacting the industry.

“We’ve got a number of new contracts which will help profitability and the same time we’ve got the issue of foreign exchange and Brexit. All of our fuel, maintenance, spare parts are paid for in dollars and have just become more expensive.

“It is never going to be plain sailing, or plain flying I should say, but we’ve got to keep running it as well as we can and operational performance is the best way to do that. The most cost effective way to run an airline is on time.”

Mr Hinkles concedes Virgin’s routes may have had a touch more glamour, but that Orkney is his favourite Loganair destination. A good day is a trip to Kirkwall for meetings (where he recently bid to take the airline’s service in the islands past the 50 year mark) before joining the flight crew on the inter-island services. For a boy of eight who became fascinated with aircraft, it sounds like a fitting way to spend his career.

“[The other] Monday I took the evening flight to North Ronaldsey and we delivered five passengers and picked up a couple to bring back, which is what we do up there. It’s just great.”