Fermanagh District Council has insisted that the decision taken this week to close St Angelo Airport near Enniskillen will be reviewed again at the end of the year.
The airport is to close at the end of March but the council, which owns the airport, said it would not be sold. About £1 million sterling was spent within the past five years on runway strengthening works.
Fermanagh District Council's director of development, Mr Peter Thompson, said efforts had been made on two fronts to develop business at the airport but neither had proved successful. Consultants recommended by Bord Fáilte and the Northern Ireland Tourism Board had been hired to try to attract more charter business, but no new carriers were found.
Efforts had also been made to get a public-service contract to run flights between Enniskillen and Belfast or Dublin.
"There was no light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of efforts were made to capture business but unfortunately it wasn't there," Mr Thompson said.
He said there was no doubt the airport could have been a very important asset to tourism in the county if new business had been found.
Apart from private light aircraft, it has only been used for weekly charter flights to Jersey and Zurich during the summer months. Mr Thompson said the airport was bringing in about 500 people a year direct from Zurich but this had to be balanced against rising costs. The cost to the council was about £400,000 a year and this was "an unacceptable drain on the council's limited resources".
He said the general effects on the aviation industry of the September 11th attacks and the resulting increase in insurance costs were factors in the "very difficult decision".
The airport will be maintained and Mr Thompson said the closure decision would be reviewed at the end of the year taking into account developments in the aviation sector and opportunities available then.
While tourism in Fermanagh may have lost what was potentially a very important asset, it is generally believed that the sector will continue to grow.
Its under-development in the Northern counties is highlighted in the contrast in revenues between Fermanagh and Sligo. Marketing Sligo Forum, which this week launched its new three-year programme aimed at bringing more tourists to Sligo, found that revenue from tourism in 2000 was worth £78 million (€99 million) to the county.
In Fermanagh in the same year tourism revenues were £25 million sterling and this was an increase of some £5 million over the previous year.
Since the establishment of Tourism Ireland, set up under the Belfast Agreement, tourism is being promoted on a cross-Border basis.
The director of Lakeland Tourism in Fermanagh, Ms Tanya Cathcart, said an all-Ireland promotional tour in the United States had let people know the country was "open for business" after last year's foot-and-mouth outbreak.
She said she believed tourism had already overtaken agriculture as the county's main industry and that it provided more than a thousand full-time jobs.