At last the Government is organising an about turn on the third runway at Heathrow. It is unlikely to happen before the next election but happen it will!
This is a text book example of wild promises made in opposition that in government you come to regret. It is not an uncommon mistake for all opposition parties. Zac Goldsmith MP had much influence on David Cameron in opposition as did Theresa Villiers MP. There is some poetic justice in Theresa Villiers being moved to Northern Ireland – she will discover that they are desperate to get a third runway at Heathrow. Of all the British regions, they are worst hit by the lack of flights and restricted destinations to their export markets.
My colleague and roommate at Westminster – Lord Berkeley – is a great spokesman for the railways (see post below).The rail industry stands to gain commercially from the pro rail campaign. Good! I’m in favour of railways too but I don’t want us to make the same mistake as we made with railways when the Beeching proposals resulted in so many useful lines being closed. The same short sighted measure will damage aviation. The Chinese do concentrate more on continental Europe then on the UK for several reasons. Both airports and visa costs put them off.
The other mistake is to assume that it is only passengers that matter. A mere 0.5% of flights at Heathrow are freight flights but 62% of UK air exports (by weight) go from Heathrow and the value of those exports (to non EU destinations) is £32 billion! The fact is that when you fly off on holiday or business the belly of the aircraft is stuffed full of exports. Good!
It’s time to get real on aviation and its importance to the UK
More to the point still, the only way the freight airliners can make their planes pay is by stuffing them even fuller with passengers.
We live in a joyously multicultural world, with a hugely (and unnecessarily) varied diet,
so if your veggies, or fruit, or high st flowers come from Africa, you may be quite sure we have plenty of all of them, all with a one way ticket!
I can accept that there is an argument for increased airport capacity, but none of your post explains why it needs to be an extra runway at an airport that’s already in the wrong place, hemmed in by residential developments and congested transport links.
A new airport in the Thames Estuary could be much, much better than an expanded Heathrow would ever be (and let’s face it, the proposals for Heathrow would mean it was in effect three separate airports side-by-side – anyone who’s used Terminal 4 will know what a pain it is). Anyone who has landed a Hong Kong will know just how fantastic such an airport could be. The Chinese will not be very impressed when landing at Heathrow.
Heathrow could then be demolished and a huge, new suburb of London created, bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs, and alleviating the housing crisis in the city. The land would be worth a fortune with no airport nearby, and could even pay for the new one.
Another runway. What a laugh that is.
I know people who live in, Charlwood, and they are at the end of a runway. Big beautiful house and yet, they look so ill and pasty when you see them, they resemble The adams Family. All of them so strangely accommodating to their plane time. They fly across, on average, about one every three minutes. Must not sit in the garden as that means jet fuel spread all over your best Sunday dress. The hair stinks and it leaves a funny taste in the tea. And lets not forget the noise. Utter deafness which means a word cannot be spoken, so a frozen scrunched face takes over and spoils the entire Surrey ensembles. The joke is, she had a barn and invited the gifted children from Menuhin school for a concert one weekend and, of course, it was entirely wasted. Not even the Nigella cakes were licked as no one wanted to lose their perfect pitch.
They pretend it’s not happening and ask you to do the same. Their children have that like odd pasty pallor and they use some kind of device attached to their ear drum in order to remain in mobile contact as the frantic text begins to take over between aircraft disturbance. They fly so low I’m sure it will drop on our heads before they reach the runway. And although they are told night flights are limited to certain hours, they are not. That is a blatant cover up.
The Chinese do not come to the UK because its sleazy and bears no resemblance to their fantasy of life in the UK. They want to visit a country they dream of that is English, with pea souper fogs and the once BBC voice akin to pretentious Fanny Craddock.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOozP9eBRHY&feature=related
Whilst in France they still get what they pay for. French people speaking French not potwah, with a virtually untouched Paris remains in situ. No high rise building except around the peripherique. A strong Napoleon architectural presence remains visible with the luscious ambiance. Here we have a ‘hodge podge’ of unrelated and curiously adored horrors that grow in ugly masses of filthy towering erections posted willy nilly, showing huge torn and dirty bill boards helping to sell the crap like underwear they wrap around the famous footballers with oozing paint work tattooed to their seedy armpits.
When you arrive at, Heathrow, where the new runway is said to be desired you find, instead of London, Bangladesh. Stinking seats and toilets, trash all over the floor and nasty, fast food chains spilling out from a dung heap of unsanitary GM products that would make you barf should you be silly enough to stop for a bite.
Go on, tell us, which one of you has the friend who promised a nice little cut if you pull this grotesque nightmare out of the mire?…. Mmm? How much did he offer? Enough to go and set up in Italy with another Baroness we said goodbye to not so long ago?
And as a footnote, the priapic, great, fat clown ‘Boris’ hasn’t got a clue either. The Thames is not suitable for anything other than water craft. Planes landing there from Europe are a massive pollutant to British children who already can barely breath from asthma. As he has an assortment of them in his house and elsewhere, you may think he had a duty to see them okay? No?
Heathrow is running at 99.2% of capacity.
If you’re looking at polution, what better but to move to Sheppey or the Isle of Grain. With the prevailing wind, most of it is blown towards Holland.
The question really has to be, which gives the most profit. Which give losses.
If its a loss, you don’t invest. If its a profitable deal then you allow the private investor to invest.
There is no need for government money. It’s all about planning laws.
@LB:
Yes, why don’t we all move out to no man’s land and let the crazy faces, with the Redwood eyes, walk in and take over the lot. And smile knowingly as they pollute themselves and their cretinous kids to oblivion. Oh, wait a minute, forgot, they make sure they are free of the mess they create for the rest of us, don’t they. That is in their contract. No come back for me. I’m safe.
For the likes of you, the entire planet should go on strike. Stop the world and let you get off.
It won’t be long before your fellow man will see a comeuppance. You invest and no takers. Nobody putting their hands in their pockets. Simply and simultaneously, they collectively remove their hand from the debt bin and leave you to it. Lock, stock and barrel. It could be done and easily. It only takes the will to make change the way the mass want it.
And as a final resort, stick the culprits heads in the jet fume vents and leave them there to suck it and see.
You can organise your life. I’m not stopping you forming a socialist republic with whomever you want
Why do you insist on controlling other people?
Why do you want other people’s money for your own ends?
Big beautiful house and yet, they look so ill and pasty when you see them, they resemble The adams Famil
And the cows just there are so stressed out by the runway noise, and the aircraft just overhead, that they do not give milk.
The campaign for the Bournemouth Hurn airport run by a local woman a few hundred metres from my home, to discourage local objections to being in a flight path, has to be heard to be believed.
There have been no objections. If there is a gunshot, or the sound of a motorbike in the vicinity she starts a petition; a dozen in a couple of years to distract attention from the constantly increasing aircraft noise across rural dorset from East to West.
The campaign is carefully planned and she is probably well paid, also as the wife of a district council employee. It certainly proves successful ambition on the part of the Aviation authority to regionalise and even localize international flights from the UK.
Another runway at Heathrow can only be concerned with increasing CARGO imports/exports, other than human cargo, the latter being cargo nonetheless.
My initial contribution does not appear.
(Was it judged “Un-suitable” ?
suppressed or merely somehow delayed ?
It was submitted quite early on, as I recall, on the morning of St080912).
——————
Heathrow both as-is and as-further-“projected”
is one of a disorderly tangled worldwide web, and Life-eroding evil-brood, of Wastefulnesses and evanescent Private-Profiteerings
that are literally guzzling-away this Human Race’s Future Lifesupports and chances of emigrating to an ‘Earth II’,
and thus are major “players” in the greater-planned and irreversible extinction of Lifesupports and one-way destruction of Non-Renewable Respources that are essential not only for Space-Emigration but for the Tolerable-Comfort of the great majority of People who must be left behind on this Earth I
It is one of Britain’s baddies, as a longest-term cost-ineffective Lifesupports-Destroyer;
Just examine the bad-costs of the greater-contextuals
as well as of ‘ sub-spanners-in-the-works’;
both as Non-Renewables-Destroyers and Renewable-Lifesupports-Extincters ;
then
(as all other respondents so far have intimated, and Lord Soley’s one-line ender could indicate “It’s time to get real on _ _ _ _ and its importance to Britain”)
Heathrow and the rest of the its worldwide Class-of-Short-Term-Balloonery-“Profitables” are far from being cost-effective and of primary-essentiality.
Heathrow will be seen as being already a deeply-indebted Major Threat both to Human-life & Civilisations, and to Earthlife-Itself,
and is being planned to get worse;
and it has already been seen that it needs to be supplanted by Worldwide Electronic-Conferencing,
and by Local Holistic Health-Building Centres and Holiday Camps
the latter quite seriously also needing to be within easy walking, pushbiking, and green-public-transport distance of every-one’s individual place of residence
wheresoever in Britain
and really regardless of whether Heathrow and the rest of its Evil-Brood survive or not.
Jonathan.
It would be quite possible to build a new airport although the Estuary has a number of major problems and Stansted would be a better option. Either way you have two other big problems.
Firstly there are 76,000 jobs on the airport at Heathrow and another 100,000 estimated to be dependent on it remaining a premier hub (the figures are similar for Frankfurt and Amsterdam). All the industry and facilities would have to be developed at the new site. Secondly, we don’t have much time. A new airport would take between 10 and 20 years to get operational. We have left things so late that by that time Amsterdam and Frankfurt will have taken over.
I know there are problem to be overcome, but we have to be more visionary about these things.
The 76,000 jobs would move to the new airport. OK, they may not all be the same people doing them, but an employed person is an employed person. The 100,000 would either move or stay where they are, depending how important being close to the airport actually is. Then there could be a further 100,000 jobs at least created on the redeveloped Heathrow site, plus new jobs around the new airport, all jobs that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.
As for time, we certainly need to start a new airport now, not in 2015. Then do a deal: for five years before it opens, allow some mixed-mode use of Heathrow’s runways. The carrot is that Heathrow will then close, and the compensation for residents will be the large increase in value of their properties.
You have far more than airline performance in Franfurt and Amsterdam to worry about. Europe is planning to build a united continent, which we will never be able to compete with, once we have left the EU. And that is what is being planned for us. Isn’t it? A sniveling US State.
Already moves are being made in Brussels to unite more closely as a thriving world leader. Yes, and with the Euro in tact. Which will leave the UK to be its longed for 51st State in this windy ocean, trading in dollars no doubt.
Job seekers need to find employment in a safe environment and building yet another runway in that unkempt and ill serviced place called Heathrow will not provide sustainable conditions for a work force or the surrounding inhabitants within its fall out. And the proposal is a betrayal of your promise to the people who have fought endlessly against such horrendous infringements on their quality of life.
United in debt.
Maude – what happened to your light touch? Have you been putting vinegar on your cornflakes?
United in debt.
Is this the football club or a remark about amortisation?
<p<Have you been putting vinegar on your cornflakes?
Ha! Ha! Ha! Bless the lady! or best bitter from the night before?
Clive Soley suggests that 62% of air freight leaving the UK goes in the belly of aircraft, thereby helping the economics of air travel. When I met senior expecitves from BAA recently to talk about rail access and links to HS2 and Crossrail, I asked if they would welcome some air freight being sent to places such as Paris, Brussels and Frenkfurt by high speed rail, as proposed by a French company CAREX. If so, they might need rail access and a terminal nearby. the answer was a resounding ‘no’. The airlines pprefer to send their air freight in the belly of airliners rather than send it by a dedicated high speed rail service.
But then reducing carbon emissions is not top of airlines’ agendas so a bit more won’t matter much!
And if airlines still refuse to consider rail for short haul air freight(as CAREX is proposing between Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt), there is no reason why this traffic needs to use Heathrow rather than another airport just because it does so now!
One of the arguments for the extra runway is to make it more green because aircraft would spend less time flying in circles and burning fuel waiting for their turn to land.
@Dave H: that would be true if it was just the same flights using the newly-expanded airport. But BAA want to make as much money as possible by introducing more flights. Before long, Heathrow would be at capacity again, all the planes would still be flying in circles, but there would be 50% more of them.
Absolutely right Lord Soley. I still think a new airport is needed long-term, but is clear that the Mayor and his ‘advisor’ Daniel Moylan have done virtually nothing to advance this but are simply concerned with blocking Heathrow. So a new runway for LHR is becoming necessary even in the short term. Closing LHR even with a new airport would be madness, because of all the infrastructure and capacity a two runway airport offers. Paris Orly is doing well despite the existance of Paris CDG. Similarly LHR would continue post-London new airport (I think though that one of the outer minor hub airports could close such as Luton).
Interesting that HACAN bangs on (and on!) about High Speed rail and cites France. Well I lived there and indeed the TGV did cut domestic flights – but the French have built 4 runways for Paris CDG rather than stayed with two. That surely disproves the myth of HACAN that LHR has lots of spare capacity if only we cut domestic flights and built some High Speed rail links.
I am also amused at how all these anti-aviation activists actually fly regularly preaching their anti-airport gospel. Presumably they don’t want flights for plebs but only upper-middle class people like themselves?