The Anonymous Widower

London’s Airports

You don’t have to wait long before a story about London’s airports comes about. Today, there’s story about a protest from the people of Kent about the Mayor of London’s support for an airport in the Thames Estuary.

They protestors actually recommend the following ideas.

  1. A high speed rail link between Gatwick and Heathrow.
  2. Improved rail connections to other regional airports.
  3. A second runway at Gatwick after 2019.
  4. Development of other regional airports, like Manston and Lydd.

This I suppose is something as usually protestors are very negative.

I should say that although, I don’t do it now, I’ve flown many times over Kent in a light aircraft  and it is actually surprising how much green space there is. Now, I’m not saying we concrete it all over, but how many of those who fought the Channel Tunnel Rail Link or the M2 and M20, ten or so years ago, are still fighting them. I think this shows, that if you build rail and road links sympathetically, you actually get people on your side, as they are the ones that often benefit most from the new links.

So let’s look at their proposals in turn.

1. The Gatwick to Heathrow Rail Link

Heathrow is supposed to be on a spur to the new HS2 line from London to Birmingham.  But why can’t the spur go right under Heathrow and on to Gatwick? Thoughts on the subject by civil servants are here in the Telegraph.

Thinking even more radically, you might even start HS2 at some point on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and then it could encircle London to the South West with stations at Gatwick, Woking and Heathrow.

One of the great advantages of a Gatwick to Heathrow link is that you separate London bound passengers from those, who are not going to the capital or even taking a connecting flight.

2. Improved Connections to Other Regional Airports

Once we have completed Thameslink and Crossrail, a lot of this will have been established. Journeys between airports like Gatwick and Luton, Heathrow and Southend will be no changes or just one. Even Gatwick to Heathrow will only be one change at Farringdon station.

In fact, will these two modern railways, with big trains revolutionise the way people travel through London.

Imagine, you are a businessman travelling from say San Francisco to Qatar. American Airlines seems to book you via London, where you change planes.  You might find after an eleven hour or more flight, that staying in a good hotel in the centre of the best city in the world is a good alternative to carrying on.  After all even now Gatwick to Farringdon is just 40 mins and Heathrow to Farringdon is quoted as 30 mins on the Crossrail site, when that line opens.

So could this simple route via Farringdon, demolish the case for a high-speed rail link between Gatwick and Heathrow? It certainly will for those, who can afford to spend a night in a good London hotel or want to stay over. Farringdon is of course a short taxi ride or a one-stop train journey from most main line terminal stations.

One of the things that would make Farringdon a better interchange is some more hotels in the area. But even so, it’s not a bad location for a transport interchange. It’s also next to the wife market in Smithfield and on a more legal level from the best of London’s lawyers.

So perhaps we’ve got the CrossRail/Thameslink railways right

3. A second runway at Gatwick after 2019

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.

But in my mind Gatwick is the place to put extra runway capacity in the South-East of England. Flights tend to avoid flying over the capital and the rail links, when they are finished will be good.

4. Development of other regional airports, like Manston and Lydd

It’s interesting to see the people of Kent wanting to take their share of the development. I suppose they understand the benefits a large airport will bring.

Manston airport could be easily connected to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and as it has a long runway.  But that’s about it.  Financially, it has always been a failure, but it is there for things like maintenance and freight.

Lydd airport is one of those places that grew up after the Second World War to serve a short-hop-to-France market. It does a bit more now, but would not be an airport of my choice.

However saying that about Lydd, over the previous few months, Southend airport has been developed from a small field to a proper airport, with easyJet as an operator. It has a rail link to Liverpool Street station in London, which takes about 50 minutes. But Southend has quite a large catchment area including East London, Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich, with good rail and road links. To a certain extent, it will take business from Stansted.

In fact you can now see a pattern developing of London’s airports. The two big ones; Heathrow and Gatwick are badly placed and you wouldn’t put them there now, but remember, the capacity will rise as more and more airlines use larger and larger aircraft at these airports. I can see a time, when these airports completely ban 737’s and the like. I’ve just found, that you can fly Heathrow to Paris in a small Airbus 319. Surely, we need to improve the rail links, so more passengers take the train.

Around these two large airports, a ring of smaller ones is developing.

  1. Stansted, which is big enough to take long-haul, is still considered a low-cost airline airport
  2. Luton, which is very much a low-cost airline and charter airport
  3. City, which is an ideally placed short-haul business airport
  4. Southend, which is developing into another low-cost airline airport

What is missing, is a low-cost airline airport, or even a business airport like City to the west, with good quick connections to Heathrow. A third shorter runway at Heathrow might have worked for the latter.

I think though on balance, that we shouldn’t take any serious decisions about expanding Heathrow or replacing it with an airport in the Thames Estuary, until CrossRail and Thameslink are fulkly operational and the plans for HS2 are finalised.

May 12, 2012 Posted by | News, Transport/Travel | , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Two Pilots Start Bitching

This report is in several web sites, but I’ve chosen This is North Devon.

It was one hell of a row and no wonder they got sacked, as it must have compromised safety.

I did like that the pilot in charge was called Bird. Perhaps he was an emu.  After all, was it Michael Parkinson called one a stupid bird?

 

April 20, 2012 Posted by | News, Transport/Travel | , , , | 1 Comment

The Grahame-White Aircraft Factory

This historic building is now part of the RAF Museum at Hendon and has been fully restored and added too, by moving the Watchtower to join it.  The latter operation was shown on BBC TV.last night. The building contains aircraft from the First World War and earlier and they are listed here on the Museum’s website.

In some ways, it is one of the best parts of the museum. The BBC programme was very much worth seeing as it gave a deep insight into Claude Grahame-White, who in many ways has become a forgotten aviation pioneer.

April 7, 2012 Posted by | World | , , , , | Leave a comment

Visiting the RAF Museum at Hendon

Yesterday, I went to see the RAF Museum at Hendon.  It is an easy trip from central London by public transport, with just a trip to Colindale station on the Northern line and then four stops on a 303 bus.

It is a museum worth visiting with a large collection of aircraft.  It’s also free to enter and the staff seem a lot more clued up than at some museums you visit.

I didn’t stay too long in the main museum and only took a couple of pictures, as I’d come to see the Grahame-White Aircraft Factory.

April 7, 2012 Posted by | Transport/Travel, World | , | Leave a comment

Where’s The Mosquito?

The extraordinary obituary of Ted Sismore in the Telegraph is also a catalogue of the amazing exploits of the most versatile aircraft of the Second World War; the de Havilland Mosquito. The Times describes the Mosquito as Britain’s first multi-role combat aircraft, but some of its exploits weren’t actually in combat. The aircraft flew in US Air Force colours to perform high-altitude weather research and also as an airliner to bring valuable cargoes, as varied as ball bearings, the physicist Neils Bohr and Marshall Zhukov across the North Sea to the UK.

In 1962, Queen Elizabeth awarded the Order of Merit to the Mosquito’s designer; Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. He is the only aircraft designer to receive the award, which is a personal gift of the sovereign.

So as we come to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, it would be fitting that one of de Havilland’s wooden wonders should be in the fly-past to mark the event. But it won’t be as there are no flyable examples left in the UK. The non-flying prototype sits in splendour at the de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Centre in the hangar where it was built.

But then the RAF had no policy on the preservation of historic aircraft.

April 6, 2012 Posted by | Transport/Travel, World | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Pilot Loses It

Apparently a pilot from American airline JetBlue lost it as is reported here.

What is interesting, is that The Times says, that a fully qualified pilot was travelling as a passenger.

This is in fact quite common and all those stories where the two pilots eat the same dodgy meal and a passenger then lands the plane are very unlikely.  A survey some years ago, said that most flights had someone amongst the passengers, who could bring the plane safely down.

March 28, 2012 Posted by | Transport/Travel | | 4 Comments

Doric Nimrod Air Two

A small article in The Times today entitled Investors queue up for aviation’s double-deckers,  caught my eye. It talks about a company called Doric Nimrod Air Two, that will buy and lease out Airbus A380 double-deck airliners, giving investors upwards of a nine-percent return on capital.

Would I invest, if I was as rich as Croesus?

You have to admire their innovation, but the aircraft are leased to Emirates, which is a Middle East airline. In that troubled region, there are more nutcases, than on all the peanut farms in Georgia.  You don’t have to actually shoot a plane down, just hit it with something very explosive on the ground.

After all, the share price of the company dipped, when the A380 developed wing cracks.

So it may work, but it is not an investment that appeals to me.

I’d prefer to put my money in Zopa and get around six percent.

March 27, 2012 Posted by | Finance, Transport/Travel | , | Leave a comment

If You Can’t Get a Seat on the Train Try Holyhead to Cardiff

In the South-East and many other areas of England, trains may be overcrowded, but not if you want to go from or to North Wales and Cardiff. According to the April 2012 edition of Modern Railways, some trains only carry an average of eight First Class passengers and a chef to cook the free meals. This is subsidised at a rate of £1.7million by the Welsh Assembly. They also subsidise air passengers to the tune of £160 a journey.  There’s more of it here.

March 25, 2012 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , , , | Leave a comment

When Airlines Knew What Service Meant – 3

This is a third tale from about 1985 and again it concerns British Airways, but I suspect in those days any good airline did their utmost for their passengers, as it was cheap positive publicity.

A friend, his wife and another couple had gone for a weekend in somewhere like Malaga.  They had worried about actually getting there, as the French air traffic controllers were having one of their periodic bouts of industrial action.

They werent’t particularly bothered, as if they didn’t get back on Monday, Tuesday would do.

On the Monday, various tour reps arrived at the hotel and said that everybody would get home, but it would be a bit late and they would be picked up from the hotel at the expected time.  But the British Airways rep told her charges to wait in the hotel and they’d be picked up three hours before the flight was to leave.

So about nine, they all trooped onto the coach for the airport, where chaos reigned, as no flights were going back to the UK, due to the French. At midnight, they were called to the departure lounge and pretty soon were on their plane.

They’d been expecting a 737, but the plane was a wide-bodied Tri-Star, which BA filled with other passengers caught up from the Sunday or at the chaos at other airports.

Once airborne, the pilot explained the Tri-Star by saying that the French weren’t allowing any planes through their airspace, so they’d used the longer-range Tri-Star and filed a flight-plan on the way out to Bermuda, with Malaga as the alternate. Then halfway across the Atlantic, they’d declared  a minor emergency and as they were just north of Spain, requested they go to the alternate. He said the flight home would be a bit longer, as they were totally avoiding French air-space.

It must have used a lot more fuel, but there were lots of contented passengers.

 

February 6, 2012 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , , | 2 Comments

When Airlines Knew What Service Meant – 2

In about 1979 or so, we ad an awful Christmas Eve in the UK, which meant that lots of aircraft were frozen to their stands at Heathrow and nothing could go in or out.

At the time a colleague in Metier was in Amsterdam and needed to get back for Christmas. He got to Schipol and there were massive queues as no planes were flying to the UK, because most airports were shut. But instead of giving up, as they do these days, British Airways managed to get a Tri-Star to Schipol from somewhere.  But where was it to go? It then turned out that the then small East Midlands Airport was open and during the afternoon and evening, it shuttled passengers across the North Sea.  The last flight arrived in England at three o’clock in the morning, as they kept the airport open late, so as not to ruin Christmas for the passengers. The airline is supposed to have commandeered all the coaches in the area to complete passengers journeys.

But everybody had a good Christmas and British Airways got a lot of publicity.

I can’t imagine it happening today! In fact today, there are reports of incoming passengers to the UK,  stuck in places like  Barcelona and Shannon.

February 6, 2012 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , | Leave a comment

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