On this page (5 sections)
The route in one look
Two single-terminal airports, 250 miles apart, and no border in between.
The route runs from Birmingham (BHX) to Edinburgh (EDI), and it works the same in reverse: someone searching for Edinburgh to Birmingham wants this same page. Edinburgh has one airport, so there is nothing to disambiguate at the far end, which is not true of every Scottish route. Glasgow, for instance, has both Glasgow International and Prestwick.
Edinburgh Airport gives the flight time as 1h 15m, and the two airports sit about 250 miles apart in a straight line, roughly 403 km. That is a genuinely short hop: the seatbelt sign goes off and comes back on again quickly, and the cabin service is brief on any airline flying it.
The useful number is not the flight time though, it is the door-to-door time. Bag drop, security and boarding at Birmingham, then the walk out at Edinburgh, realistically puts the whole trip closer to three hours from arriving at the airport to leaving it. That is still comfortably faster than the alternative, which is the point of the route.
Who flies it
One airline non-stop, and connections that are not worth the time.
easyJet is the only airline flying Birmingham to Edinburgh without a stop, and it operates the route year round rather than seasonally. That single-carrier position is worth knowing before you book: on a route with two competing airlines there is usually a fallback if your flight is cancelled, and here there is not. If the day goes wrong, the realistic alternatives are the train or a later easyJet service.
Other airlines will sell you the city pair with a connection, typically through a European hub, but a one-stop routing on a 250-mile domestic trip is not a serious option unless something unusual is going on with fares. It turns a 75-minute flight into most of a day. The full airline line-up at Birmingham shows where easyJet sits in the wider network, and every direct route from Birmingham puts the Scottish services alongside the rest.
For the actual departure times on the day you travel, the live departures board carries the schedule over the hours ahead. Frequencies and timings shift with the season, so book against easyJet's own timetable rather than a number written on a guide.
Flying or the train
On this route the plane wins clearly, which is not true from London.
Birmingham to Edinburgh is one of the domestic routes where flying is genuinely the better answer, and it is worth being precise about why. Avanti West Coast puts the fastest direct train from Birmingham New Street to Edinburgh at about 4h 12m, with the average journey nearer 4h 20m. Against 1h 15m in the air, that is a gap wide enough to survive all the airport time you can throw at it.
Compare that with London, where the same argument does not hold: Kings Cross to Edinburgh is about 4h 08m on the fastest trains, and there are far more of them. Birmingham gets a similar journey time on paper but with fewer direct services, so the train is both slower relative to the flight and less flexible if your plans move.
The train still wins on two things. It runs city centre to city centre, putting you at Edinburgh Waverley in the middle of the Old Town rather than eight miles west of it, and it is the more forgiving option if you are carrying a lot of luggage or travelling with small children. If your meeting is a five-minute walk from Waverley and you value a working table for four hours, the train is a reasonable call. For most other trips from Birmingham, flying is the faster way to get there.
At Birmingham Airport
One terminal, a domestic departure, and no passport queue at either end.
Birmingham has a single terminal, so the usual airport puzzle of working out which building you need does not arise. Bag drop and security are the whole of the departure process, and the airport map shows how the terminal is laid out if you have not used it before. Edinburgh also runs a single terminal, so the arrival is equally simple.
Because this is a domestic flight inside the United Kingdom, there is no immigration control in either direction. You will not queue at a border on arrival and you will not need a passport, though you do need photo identification that easyJet accepts, and the airline sets that list rather than the airport. Check it before you leave for the airport, not at the bag drop.
If you have time before the flight, the lounges at Birmingham are open to paying customers as well as to travellers with an eligible ticket or card, which is worth knowing on an early departure when the terminal is busy.
Who it suits
An easy recommendation from Birmingham, with one honest exception.
For almost anyone travelling between the West Midlands and central Scotland, this is the route to take. The flight time is short enough that a same-day return is realistic for a meeting, the time saving over the train is large rather than marginal, and Birmingham Airport is straightforward to use with a single terminal and no border formalities on a domestic trip.
The case is weaker in two situations, and it is worth saying so. If your trip is genuinely city centre to city centre and your schedule is flexible, the train delivers you to Edinburgh Waverley without the airport time at either end, and four hours with a table and a plug is not wasted time for everyone. And if you need certainty on a specific date, a single-carrier route carries real risk: with only easyJet flying it non-stop, a cancellation leaves you with fewer options than you would have on a route with competing airlines.
Otherwise, fly it. On the numbers this is one of the clearer domestic cases in the country, and the Birmingham to Glasgow route reads much the same way if Scotland's other big city is where you are heading.