Gatwick Makes A Pitch For The Third Runway
Canary Wharf tube station is all decked out in adverts for expanding Gatwick.
It’s certainly a tough fight between the two airports about which one gets developed.
On the ninth of October, I had a letter published in The Times, under the title, Plane or Train?
Sir, The closure of Richard Branson’s Little Red airline (News, Oct 7) comes at a time when people in their millions are rediscovering trains, raising a question over the attraction and viability of short-haul air services. Together with the introduction of aircraft that can carry up to a third more passengers, this leads me to wonder whether we need new runway capacity.
Effectively, it is a shorter reworking of some of the arguments in Hot Air Over London’s Airports.
To also stoke up the fire, Heathrow Hub were also advertising heavily in the papers at the weekend.
As I said in Hot Air Over London’s Airports, I quite like this proposal. This liking gets bigger every time I read about it.
One thing their reports and all the other proposals don’t talk about for obvious reasons, is the unpredictability of some of the world’s worst air accidents. Just read up on the circumstances that led to the Tenerife Airport Disaster.
For this and other reasons, I would leave the decisions to the professionals. And they will probably say that some proposals have a bigger safety margin than others!
But I still feel my last statement in the Hot Air post might be correct.
But I have this sneaking suspicion that no new runways will be built or extended and in twenty years time or so, we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.
Passengers will just choose their airports with more care and airports will be competing with us with better and better facilities and more point-to-point flights.
But then some politician might want to add his name to a new London airport.
The Power Of Check-Lists
The most interesting article in The Times yesterday was entitled How A Checklist Saved A Little Girls Life. It starts like this.
A simple procedure borrowed from the airline industry and a bit of humility has ensured many more patients survive
It is powerful stuff and I hope every doctor and health administrator reads it. But I doubt they will, as what does the aviation industry know about medicine?
The author of the article Atul Gawande is giving the Reith Lectures this year. I shall be listening.
Heathrow and Gatwick Will Cost More
Surprise! Surprise! The BBC is reporting that the proposals for a new runway at either Heathrow or Gatwick will cost more!
The Airports Commission says a second runway at Gatwick would cost £2bn more than the bid suggests.
Two separate plans to expand Heathrow are predicted to cost £3-4bn more.
T’was, ever thus! The first real estimate of the cost of a large project is inevitably more than the back-of-a-fag-packet estimate.
Only when the designers and project engineers work out how the project is to be realised do we get a figure for the actual cost. Usually, in construction projects, this figure can generally be relied upon.
But as I’ve believed for some time, I don’t think we’ll ever build a new runway in the South East.
Is Sir Howard Going To Recommend A Second Runway At Gatwick?
This report in the Standard speculates that Sir Howard Davies report on London airports might be recommending a second runway at Gatwick.
I think this could be a sensible solution, to providing more runway capacity in the South East of England.
I said in this post, that Gatwick’s second runway, if it is built, should be North South. Here’s what I said.
I used to fly a lot and was an avid reader of Flight International. Years ago, an airline pilot proposed building a second runway at Gatwick, by building over the M23 and putting that in a tunnel underneath. The runway would have been North-South, which is an unusual direction for the UK, but would only have been used for take-off in a southerly direction.
He had a point and it shows how if you think radically, you may come up with better solutions.
I still think that this North-South proposal should be seriously examined.
Gatwick also has good rail links to London. My only questions are, are the links as good as they can be and are doing enough to make Farringdon a proper hub with restaurants, hotels and offices? I mused on the latter here!
We need some radical thinking to link the major airports together and also to the Channel Tunnel and HS2.
The Anonymous Widower 