Until recently, a cargo ship called Blade Runner Two would frequently carry 279-foot-long wind turbine blades from a factory on the Isle of Wight to the nearby English mainland.

The island, about a mile off Britain’s south coast, cannot be reached by rail or road, but the voyage of the huge blades showed that the Isle of Wight’s isolation had not stopped it from contributing to the country’s economy.

In recent months, though, Blade Runner Two has made few voyages.

Vestas, the Danish company that made the blades, is pulling back on production on the Isle of Wight, where it has operated for more than two decades. Offshore wind farms require even longer blades now, and Vestas said its plant was too small to make them.

Last year, it reached an agreement with the British government to make the shorter blades for onshore wind turbines at the factory on the island, but it is cutting the work force there by half, to 300 employees.

The downsizing is a heavy blow for the Isle of Wight, which has long relied on a few large manufacturers to inject a measure of dynamism into its economy and provide well-paying jobs.

“It’s an issue in terms of wealth for the island,” said Richard Quigley, a Labour Party member of Parliament who represents part of the Isle of Wight. “That’s potentially 300 good salaries that are disappearing.” Mr. Quigley’s wife, Leah, runs the cafeteria at Vestas, and they have long owned a fish and chip shop, Corries Cabin, in nearby Cowes.

Island economies often face difficulties related to their isolation, but the Isle of Wight is unusual in having to deal with many at once, said Adam Cox, a visiting economics professor at the University of Portsmouth in England. They include the high cost of the ferries, an aging population, the low opportunity for business growth, the absence of universities and a limited supply of housing.

It does have draws. The Isle of Wight’s beaches, for all their beauty, are usually not too crowded. Its countryside is among the most beautiful in Britain, and Lord Tennyson, who lived on the island, reputedly said its air was “worth sixpence a pint.”

Its relative inaccessibility has led to a slower pace of life, one of the reasons many retire there. (Thirty percent of its population is over age 65.) “There’s stunning scenery in places,” Mr. Cox said. “They don’t want that to ever change.”

But as older people move in, younger ones leave for better prospects on the mainland, a trend that is shrinking the island’s labor pool, potentially deterring companies from setting up or expanding on the island.

Britain’s statistical agency, extrapolating current population trends, estimates that close to 38 percent of the population there will be 65 or older in 2047. That’s far higher than 19 percent estimated for Portsmouth, a city on the other side of the Solent, the strait that separates the island from the mainland, and 23 percent for Britain as a whole.

(In 1971, Parliament passed a law putting onerous restrictions on large rock festivals on the island. They began again in 2002.)

On the street behind the Sandown hotels, Vivette Fryatt, sitting in her Caribbean restaurant, said she and her husband made enough from their eatery, Viv’s Cooking, to cover their bills but not much more. In 2023, they vacationed in a town just five miles northeast of Sandown called Bembridge.

“Despite the challenges, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” she said, “It’s a beautiful place. It just needs a bit of T.L.C.”

For all the difficulties businesses face, companies on the island say they are committed to the area, and some expect to expand.

BAE Systems, Britain’s largest defense company, has a factory in Cowes that makes radar equipment. The work force there has grown 15 percent in recent years, to 300 employees, said Surinder Kaur, a BAE spokesman, and the company expects to continue expanding as Britain’s government bolsters military spending.

Mr. Kaur said BAE was investing in schools on the island to support scientific and technological studies, adding that the company “continues to play an important role on the island, contributing to its economy and prosperity.”

Wight Shipyard, which is based in Cowes and specializes in making aluminum vessels, recently delivered an electrically powered boat that will ferry passengers across the Thames River in London.

Blade Runner Two, the blade-carrying vessel, is another example of maritime innovation. Each end of the ship can act as its bow. One end is designed for sailing on the Medina, the gentle river that Vestas’s factory is on. The other end — after a 180-degree turn — becomes the bow for crossing the sometimes choppy strait.

And Britten-Norman, a small aircraft manufacturer, is moving back to the Isle of Wight.

The company relocated production of its best-selling plane, the Islander, to Romania in the late 1960s, and much of the manufacturing process was there until a few years ago.

Islanders, sometimes called Land Rovers of the Sky because pilots say they can handle demanding conditions, sell for about $2.4 million.

After struggling in recent years, Britten-Norman announced last year an investment of 10 million pounds (about $13.6 million) from Beechlands Enterprises of Northern Ireland that will help finance the expansion of a plant in Bembridge, where it first made planes more than 70 years ago.

Pete Dowers, a manager at Britten-Norman, started at the company in 1978 on the Isle of Wight and has helped build 499 aircraft. “That’s music to my ears,” he said about the hammering and drilling by the apprentices on the site, which employs 45 people. Some of the investment is being spent on repairing a rubber die press that shapes metal into plane parts.

Mr. Dowers said he thought the island’s industrial base would survive. “There will always be a manufacturing base of some sort on the Isle of Wight,” he said.

Cinematography: Jermaine Canute Bradley Edwards