Bradford bosses today hit out at British European Airline's decision to scrap its service from Leeds-Bradford International Airport to London.

And they said the airline should have given the service more time to take off before making the decision to scrap the service to London City Airport.

But British European said the service was losing £50,000 a week because not enough passengers were using it.

Tim Hindley, chief executive of Bradford Break-through, said he was disappointed the service would end on October 13.

He said: "I promoted the service when it first started six months ago and some people I know used it and found it very useful.

"Some people found it difficult to get into London city centre and that could be why they went back to using the trains."

He was backed by Ed Anderson, the airport's managing director, who said: "I am disappointed that the service is going to be scrapped as the passenger figures were in line with the targets we set of 33,000 a year.

"We are going to try very hard to find somebody to take over this service. We will be approaching a number of possible carriers in a bid to persuade them to take it up."

British European's operations director Jim French said the service had failed to pull in the passengers it needed to make it viable and had lost £670,000 since it was launched in April at a rate of £50,000 a week.

"This is the only service we will be pulling this year out of a total of 1,228 flights a week around the UK.

"We launched in April and a few months later were doing badly and hoped for a good September - but it didn't happen so we are scrapping the service."

He said the early morning flight proved to be very popular.

"But passenger figures for the other flights failed to take off so we are scrapping the service," he added.