My Take…Dare we hope it’s true?

IT’S difficult to comprehend… dare we hope that Virginia Airport is to move to Scottburgh?

This might just be “pie-in-the-sky” (excuse the pun).

However, it seems that our little coastal town is the favoured spot for a regional airport should Durban decide to close down Virginia and sell that very valuable stretch of beachfront land for development.

Of course, Virginia’s current tenants aren’t too excited at the prospect of having to move further south, but I’m sure we would all be delighted if they did.

There would be all sorts of spin-offs for Umdoni like flight schools, charter companies, recreational aviation and even a Scottburgh Air Show to name a few.

This fits in very nicely with other developments on the South Coast that MEC Mike Mabuyakhulu alluded to recently.

Hibberdene has been earmarked for a R35-billion development called Music City. The municipal notices asking for public comment were published in our sister newspaper, the South Coast Herald, last week.

Details are sketchy at this stage, but professionals – land surveyors, property agents, etc., – who have been assisting the developers say that it will be in three phases and will eventually be more than twice the size of Sun City.

It will be a “world destination” resort along the lines of others found in the Caribbean and Disney World in Orlando.

Why Hibberdene, one might ask?

The story is that an American conglomerate has been searching around South Africa for an appropriate sight for several years. They could not find a suitable and big enough piece of land in Cape Town and on-going land claims threw a spanner in the works for the North Coast.

However, much of the spadework had already been done in Hibberdene when other developers were planning a small craft harbour there some years ago.

Mr Mabuyakhulu himself latched onto the Music City developers and convinced them to keep focussing on KZN. We should know one way or the other by as soon as this month.

Think about it. It all ties in:

•  Regional airport at Scottburgh (linked to uShaka International);

•  Railway line;

•  First class highway;

•  Fantastic weather all year round.

Maybe it’s not “pie-in-the-sky” after all.

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