In a different world, the terminal building might have been redeveloped with a multistorey car park, utilising the older hangar areas that were latterly used by the Topspin tennis centre, and incorporating the station. The land where the existing terminal and car parks are would have been released for redevelopment.
However, the profile of demand has changed out of all recognition since the airport's heyday, and many of the challenges that it faced even then are still relevant now.
Corporate travel of the likes that ICI, British Steel, Monsanto, BASF, Philips Petro etc., etc., once generated has all-but long since left the Middlesbrough, Billingham, Stockton, Redcar and Hartlepool area.
Leisure travel has diversified away from a few one and two week package trips a year, dominated by charter carriers to a limited number of destinations, to multiple 'city breaks', stag and hen do's, longer hauls etc., etc., with new airline entrants such as easyJet and Ryanair at one end and Emirates at the other. Both of these ends require volume and scale.
Airline operations themselves have consolidated and retrenched in some cases. Who remembers (and misses?) Spantax and Air Europa (original incarnation). Operations, aircraft utilisation, costs and and potential yields are looked at not just regionally or nationally in a regulated past, but across Europe (if not globally) in a deregulated market.
Peel were complicit in bmi's withdrawal from Teesside, but arguably only in so much as they didn't see it coming. At the time, Lufthansa was in charge, and in a failed strategy for them, the Heathrow slots for the Teesside flights were reassigned to their new Lufthansa Italia division to fly to and from (IIRC) Milan. It's not only, therefore, that Teesside's competition is Newcastle and Leeds (say); the competitive pressures and operational decisions are far wider-spread than that.
agreed - but at least they are trying to fix things. They have got a couple of summer holiday type services back which the previous owners pushed away.
I hope that I am proved wrong, but the tour operator concerned is not (necessarily) one that I would back myself. My concern is that any failure would be highly embarrassing and set the airport back even further.
As far as the station goes, it was never particularly relevant even in the airport's heyday, when the Dormobile minibus used to run between it and the terminal. Yarm was one of the major catchments, but there was no station there then, and no means for trains passing through Yarm to reach the airport without a reversal at Eaglescliffe. Even with a Yarm station now, the same problem arises, and the new station is on the south of the town anyway; anyone in the centre would go to Allen's West or Eaglescliffe or, in only a few minutes more, be at the airport itself in their car.
It's going to take some serious imagination and resourcefulness to get passenger numbers up, but the airport will only do it if it's aggressive and responsive to any untapped or conquestable, demand and the realities of the global market in which it operates.