Cotswold Airport appoints Lee Myall as CEO effective October 1

Cotswold Airport has named Lee Myall as chief executive officer, effective October 1, as Suzannah Harvey transitions from day-to-day leadership to chair the board of the family-owned Gloucestershire airport. Myall is a company director and serial entrepreneur with a background in business development and planning, and he had been working closely with the airport in recent months on planning and estates matters. In his new role he will oversee daily operations, the airport's estates business and new commercial opportunities across the group.

"Cotswold Airport is a remarkable business and a very special place," Myall said. "My immediate priority will be to work with the existing management team to build on the very strong position the business is already in, supporting our tenants and customers while developing opportunities across both the aviation and estates businesses." Harvey, whose father Ronan Harvey purchased the former RAF Kemble site from the Ministry of Defence in 2001, said: "I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved at Cotswold Airport over the last 20 years. Lee has developed a real understanding of both the business and the opportunities presented by the wider site. His commercial experience, together with his knowledge of planning and estates, makes him extremely well placed to lead the airport through its next chapter."

The appointment follows the recent hiring of Graham Carter as group managing director and the promotion of Antonia Silk to operations director earlier this year. Cotswold Airport handles more than 36,000 aircraft movements annually across its 532-acre site, which hosts a range of aviation and aerospace businesses, and the airport has committed to achieving carbon net-zero by 2030.

Family-owned airports that sit on large, mixed-use sites often face a leadership question that goes beyond runway operations: how to manage estates, tenants and commercial development alongside flight activity. Cotswold Airport's succession plan, moving its longtime operational leader into a chair role while bringing in an executive with planning and estates experience, reflects how these businesses increasingly treat the airfield and the surrounding 532-acre site as a single commercial unit rather than two separate concerns.

This pattern also shows up in how such airports build out their leadership bench over time, layering a group managing director, an operations director and now a chief executive with estates expertise rather than relying on a single figure to run everything. Whether this structure delivers on Harvey's description of the airport's "next chapter" will depend on what commercial opportunities Myall identifies across the aviation and estates businesses, and how the existing management team executes alongside him.