The 2,741 metre long runway, currently the second longest in the north of England, was sufficiently large to take even Concorde, and in the period after the closure of the RAF airfield there were several campaigns to turn Finningley into a commercial airport for the unserved South Yorkshire region (as well as Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire).
•
The station housed a 'V' force of Vulcan bombers during the Cold War, and for 35 years it hosted a regular air show which, by the 1990s, was the largest one-day military air show in the country.