1st July 2015

Heathrow, a third runway or a third way

We hear that the airports commission has, after 3 years and £20m, recommended a third runway for Heathrow.

The proposed cost estimate of  £18.6bn will, no doubt be a severe underestimate and will involve demolition of 800 homes. 

UK plc is sometimes a very strange place, we have a wealth of resources, human, physical, structural, mineral, technologies, infrastructure, but they are not always used to best effect.

The working day for many is Monday to Friday and as the song goes ‘9 til 5’ yet the halo of travel expectation for a diverse and demanding consumer society today is manifested in the need for the availability of services 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I want it and I want it now.

In recent years this has seen stores open 7 days a week, including Christmas Day, Easter. Hospitals and GP’s are about to follow suit, as sickness is not confined to nine ‘til five. Never has demand been higher for the need to want to do something and want to do it now. 

So why not apply this thinking to the expansion of Heathrow, the UK’s prime invisible infrastructure? 

LHR is a huge and very expensive resource and for around 6 hours of every day (11.30pm to 6.00pm)  it is shut to aircraft, it very raison d’être. Flights are restricted by a Quota Count system used in the UK by London's Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted airports to limit the amount of noise generated by aircraft movements at night time (2330 - 0600).

This animation shows only too well the LHR nightly downtime. 

With the UK apparently in danger of losing business to the far eastern powerhouses surely the time has come for some third way thinking on LHR.

Sir Howard Davies who heads up the ‘Airport commission’ (yes him again) reckons that all of the proposed airport expansion options will cost a lot more than estimated. 

An entirely new runway to the north-west of Heathrow would cost around £18.6billion, Heathrow Airport Ltd's hub extension estimate of £14.8billion. An extension of the existing northern runway at Heathrow - would cost £13.5billion.

If any new runway is to be situated at either LHR or LGW and the nation cannot make up it’s mind without the delays presented by endless enquiries and judicial reviews, perhaps the solution is to release that 6 hours of airspace at LHR and go 24 hours a day, just like the society we live in demands. 

The cost of the project could surely be hugely reduced as a result?

Compensation costs by way of market value house purchase for those who do not want it across the affected noise pollution footprints could be quickly recouped as there is a huge housing shortage in the South and so any homes purchased would be quickly sold on to buyers happy to put up with the noise.

The world of aviation runs 24 hours a day, planes landing, taking off, travelling to far flung corners of the world, but not at LHR. 

It would take a brave, forward thinking government to make LHR a 24 hour a day airport, but hey, just a thought?

Panacea Comment