The most punctual airline in the UK, bmi, is now putting on regular flights to the booming French city of Lille from Leeds Bradford International Airport.

The service, which operates six days a week from Yeadon, takes less than an hour. On both occasions the flight was used by the T&A last week, the planes were ahead of schedule.

The service was introduced after pressure from the Lille Chamber of Commerce to open a route with Bradford.

The chamber commissioned a survey asking business people to identify the four cities they most wanted flights to. Alongside Madrid, Milan and Barcelona was Bradford.

The link stems from the fact that both cities share a common interest and history in the mail order and textile sectors. Lille is Europe's biggest mail order centre. It employs 60,000 people in the industry and is home to Redcats whose UK base is on Canal Road, Bradford - home to some 950 employees.

Lille also employs more than 34,000 in textiles, the industry that made Bradford the city it is.

Peter Kenworthy, regional director with bmi, said: "They specified Bradford because of the textile link, mail order and redistribution. Most of the mail order in Bradford and in Britain is owned by Redcats, based in Lille. The city is one of Europe's top ten industrial heartlands.

"We want to educate business people in Lille that they can do a morning's work there, fly to West Yorkshire at lunchtime, have meetings in the afternoon and fly back next morning."

Mr Kenworthy admitted the service was an experiment but one he expected to pay off. By the end of the day Mr Kenworthy had received news of more than 150 bookings for the first week, mostly from business people intending to stop over for one or two nights.

Jean-Christophe Minot, chief executive of Lille Airport and vice president of Lille Chamber of Commerce, is an enthusiastic supporter of the new route, mentioning that 62 of the biggest players in Lille are worth more than 142 billion euros.