Heathrow Runway 3 Approved

[Pilot]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37760187

After years of discussion, debates and reports, the Government have approved a third runway at London Heathrow, the UKs busiest airport, and the 6th busiest Airport in the world.

In my opinion at least, the third runway couldn't come soon enough, Heathrow has been crying out for expansion for years now, and needs the third runway if it is to remain up there with the likes of Atlanta, Paris CDG and Amsterdam Schipol.

Of course, there will be people who are still against it, for various, valid reasons, however, surely the benefits outweigh the negatives in this particular case? After all, that appears to be what the report (that was released earlier in the year (I think)) concluded.

[Redirect Left]

Cue a few month of it being in the news and protesters being protesters about it

I do feel sorry for the residents of Harmondsworth. Although in the words of Northern when people complained to them when Brockholes got audio announcements (it's near to a lot of properties) "Progress will always march forward".

[Chrill]

I'd blow up City and Luton, perhaps Stansted too, then build a new massive airport by tearing down some ugly suburb. Come on, demolish Croydon and build an airport.

[Dave]

Boris Island man. It was the future. Keep planes away from town.

Heathrow 3 is a shocker. We are already suffering the effects of dangerous NO2 in London and we don't need more planes in holding patterns overhead.

Weak government. A great chance to buck the trend of being desperate to have THE WORLDS BIGGEST AIRPORT NLAHHSKSJXJSJAJ in favour of a ring of smaller, compact and focused airports.

Instead Heathrow just becomes a megalopolis in its own right. And everyone around suffers.

I'd feel sorry for Goldsmith if he hadn't used 7/7 as a campaign device.

An absolute shambles.

[Pilot]

Dave, you've raised a number of very good points here, this is my take on it from having studied Aviation Operations.

Boris Island man. It was the future. Keep planes away from town.

Whilst keeping planes away from the Population Centres is always a positive, those same population centres are where the passengers of those planes want to go. There was no guarantee that if you built that Airlines would move there, after all, British Airways were very opposed to moving from their bases, where they had invested a large amount of money. If it had been built, and no one used it, it could have easily become another Montreal-Mirabel, only on a much more expensive scale.

Heathrow 3 is a shocker. We are already suffering the effects of dangerous NO2 in London and we don't need more planes in holding patterns overhead.

Whilst in the short term, the levels of NO2 may rise, in the long run, these effects will probably no greater than today, due more and more aircraft (like the A320Neo, A350, B737 Max, B777-X and B787) that are designed so that there are less of these pollutants being spewed out.

Weak government. A great chance to buck the trend of being desperate to have THE WORLDS BIGGEST AIRPORT NLAHHSKSJXJSJAJ in favour of a ring of smaller, compact and focused airports.

A ring of smaller airports isn't good for the Passengers, or the Airline industry however. Many people flying through Heathrow are connecting between two flights, and are very unlikely to want to do so if they have to travel between Heathrow and Gatwick, even if you put a high speed rail link there. This is very much the same reason as to why more capacity is wanted at LHR despite the fact that there is still capacity at Stansted. In fact the only flights that British Airways (the only full-service carrier at STN) do from Stansted are operated by BA Cityflyer to seasonal leisure destinations (Chambery for the winter ski season, Ibiza, Palma and Malaga for the Summer Holiday season), and using much smaller Aircraft, and probably meant more as competition to Ryanair and EasyJet more than anything.

With Heathrow, they have done everything in their power to increase the amount of people travelling through the airport without needing Expansion. From 2002 to 2015 an extra 11.6 Million People have flown through Heathrow (From 63.3 Million to 74.9 Million), despite this massive growth (an increase of about 18%), the number of aircraft movements have only increased by 8,000 (from 466,545 to 474,087, an increase of just 1.6%), which has been done with bigger aircraft where needed, amongst other things. In that time, both noise pollution and environment pollution will have probably gone down, due to quieter, greener aircraft (I don't have any graphs to display this unfortunately). As I've already stated, in the long run, the 3rd Runway will not pollute any more than today, and it probably won't be fully saturated immediately anyway, so there will be even less pollution than expected for a fully saturated 3rd Runway.

I'd feel sorry for Goldsmith if he hadn't used 7/7 as a campaign device.

Wait, he used 7/7 as a reason to stop the expansion of LHR? Or did he use 7/7 as a way to try and get elected Mayor of London? Either way, the current Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is opposed to the expansion of LHR also.

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Come on, demolish Croydon and build an airport.

Yes! We should rebuild London Croydon Airport with it's old Grass Runways and all fly around in Dragon Rapide's!

[Dave]

I'd feel sorry for Goldsmith if he hadn't used 7/7 as a campaign device.

Wait, he used 7/7 as a reason to stop the expansion of LHR? Or did he use 7/7 as a way to try and get elected Mayor of London? Either way, the current Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is opposed to the expansion of LHR also.

The latter. He claimed Khan's welcoming of immigrants to London encouraged terrorism like 7/7.

The quicker we can detach this wonderful town from you neanderthals the better

[YNM]

Wow, really ?

Least what can be said about the whole London Airport(s) thing : https://youtu.be/KXmpdJO9UOc
But I have to say, airplanes today are leaning towards being quieter and less harmful. So whichever plan goes forward is a good change.

[Pilot]

I'd feel sorry for Goldsmith if he hadn't used 7/7 as a campaign device.

Wait, he used 7/7 as a reason to stop the expansion of LHR? Or did he use 7/7 as a way to try and get elected Mayor of London? Either way, the current Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is opposed to the expansion of LHR also.

The latter. He claimed Khan's welcoming of immigrants to London encouraged terrorism like 7/7.

Oh of course, I'm sure that Khan was highly pleased with the events on 7/7, and all of the abuse that all Muslims (but not just Muslims, people with the same skin complexion, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, whatever) suffered as a result of those events. /endsarcasm

My lord, how stupid is Goldsmith?!

Wow, really ?

Least what can be said about the whole London Airport(s) thing : https://youtu.be/KXmpdJO9UOc
But I have to say, airplanes today are leaning towards being quieter and less harmful. So whichever plan goes forward is a good change.

The thing with that video you've just linked is that it is 2 years old now, so some of what it says is outdated. For example, at the time it was made, it had the most international passengers passing through in the world, however, not anymore, it has now lost that title to Dubai, with Hong Kong closer behind in 3rd.

[YNM]

The thing with that video you've just linked is that it is 2 years old now, so some of what it says is outdated. For example, at the time it was made, it had the most international passengers passing through in the world, however, not anymore, it has now lost that title to Dubai, with Hong Kong closer behind in 3rd.

But most of the point still stands - unless the neighborhood had changed...

[orudge]

Get it built! Of course, the third runway was approved in 2009, before being cancelled by the Coalition, so nothing is certain until the concrete is on the ground, and that is still a long way off...

[Translink]

Lives in London, complains about air pollution.

[Dave]

Lives in London, complains about air pollution.

Wanting to lower emissions of dangerous pollutants in the city I live in isn't a crime, sweetheart.

I'd appreciate less of the obvious snark too. The forum doesn't welcome it and nor do I.

[Translink]

Well what were you expecting, Dave? Boris Island is a fabulous idea on paper, but not in practice. As said above, it's simply too much of a risk for investors. Complaining about pollution in London is like complaining about alcohol being served in a pub.

[Ameecher]

Well what were you expecting, Dave? Boris Island is a fabulous idea on paper, but not in practice. As said above, it's simply too much of a risk for investors. Complaining about pollution in London is like complaining about alcohol being served in a pub.

Just because London has high levels of air pollution doesn't mean you can't aspire to lower that... Poor analogy.

[Dave]

What a load of utter codswallop.

London air pollution is obscenely high, no matter how you measure it. Cutting it down is about reducing use of the private car, encouraging car sharing, public transport use and of course cycling provision to make it safer and easier, encouraging more to do so.

Adding flight paths over the city is hardly going to help.

Oxford Street is the most polluted street in Europe. It is nose to tail buses for its entire length. These all belch out diesel. Fannying about with a ridiculous bus that they've only just switched the hybrid tech back on to. Shambles. Lorries, buses, vans, mini cabs. All running on diesel. Shambles. Planes coming in over central London to land at Heathrow. Shambles.

There are hundreds of areas of improvement to be made in London in terms of emissions. Maybe not killing people by choking them to death every summer should be higher up the agenda? It should certainly be higher on yours.

Alcohol in a pub. Tripe.

[JamieLei]

Alcohol in a pub. Tripe.

I go to a pub where the urinal is slightly to the left of the middle of the pub, in full view of all the customers. Bartender decides to move urinal to a separate room to the right of the main room.

Just because a pub needs a urinal, doesn't mean the urinal needs to be in the main room of the pub.

(For the sake of spelling it out, just because a large capital city needs an airport, doesn't mean the airport has to be located inside the city limits.)

There you go, pub analogy solved.

[NekoMaster]

Alcohol in a pub. Tripe.

I go to a pub where the urinal is slightly to the left of the middle of the pub, in full view of all the customers. Bartender decides to move urinal to a separate room to the right of the main room.

Just because a pub needs a urinal, doesn't mean the urinal needs to be in the main room of the pub.

(For the sake of spelling it out, just because a large capital city needs an airport, doesn't mean the airport has to be located inside the city limits.)

There you go, pub analogy solved.

BUt if you build an airport outside of the city then you have the issue of getting people to and from the airport, and from what I've heard london already has severe traffic congestion and getting in and out quickly is impossible.

Perhaps the only way to really have a decent airport thats outside of the city limits to allow for expansion would be the boris island idea building it along the the River Thames and have a tube connection from the city to the airport from major stations in london. this way you can get people moving without extra road congestion and get people from the airport into parts of the city they may want or need to go.

[supermop]

Building a new airport also has the problem of getting people to use it - Heathrow is well located with superb rail connections, so even if a huge new 8 runway hub is built in the Thames, some carrier will still try to serve Heathrow, and unless the government can force it to close all together, it will be hard to shift the critical mass to somewhere far away. Dallas was unable to force Southwest to leave Love Field for DFW, which it needed to do to meet it's financial plans for paying off the huge new airport. Today the area around Love Field is denser than ever, and the airport remains a small but busy hub surrounded by new developments on all sides. To make the new Island make sense, you'd probably need to siphon off traffic from Standsted and Gatwick as well, otherwise you'll just end up with one more in a ring of airports around London. Heathrow is so large and well equipped compared to other close, old airports replaced by new, distant ones, that it seems that it would be particularly hard to make the new one more attractive, and particularly difficult and wasteful to shutter it.

[Pilot]

I'm going to go off on a long typing spree, there are some points in here, so if you have the time to read and pick this apart, that would be wonderful, I understand it's rather long!

The 3rd Runway (and 6th Terminal) at LHR will cost an estimated £18.6 Billion, and has the potential to bring an extra £61 Billion into the economy. The construction of Hong Kong's Chep Lap Kok airport cost $20 Billion, for a smaller airport than the one planned in the Thames Estuary, but they already had some land to play with, and that price was the cost in 1998 (probably around $32 Billion today after some rough calculations and googling). For an Airport the size of the Thames Estuary one, you would quite possibly be looking in the region of £40-50 Billion. Now, doesn't sound so bad, after all, you could only add another 2 runways at Heathrow for that price (oh, look, 4 runway Heathrow! That will likely never happen ).

However, as has been said by others, you would then need to build new traffic links at additional cost. You'd need a new motorway, a link to HS1 would be preferable too I'd imagine (This has been estimated to cost £4.5 Billion alone, and would give a 20 minute journey time to London (comparable with the HEx's 15 minutes)). I've also heard that an extension of Crossrail would be "easy to do", I imagine from Abbey Wood. These rail links may not be able to remain near the current cheapest from LHR of £5.70.

Then you have the people who currently work at Heathrow, who would likely be moved over to the new airport. Many of these live near to Heathrow, or the surrounding area to be closer to their job (I'm sure many of us have moved for work before). Some of these people would do the same and move to North Kent. House prices in West London would likely plummet as everyone tries to offload their property, whilst prices in North Kent would increase dramatically, due to the demand. Those extra people would probably need a way of getting to the new airport too (A 3-lane motorway might have to become a 4-lane, at additional cost again), but also, improved links to London (though this could definitely be done through Crossrail).

Flight paths into the new airport would not be favourable either. Whilst they wouldn't be over the Centre of London anymore, they would likely interfere with Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, potentially leading to longer arrival and approach paths at both, to avoid one another. Whilst the new airport should be able to handle more arrivals than LHR and offset the longer approach paths by being able to get the aircraft in almost instantly, it still might not be favourable to the Airlines due to extra fuel use (in a world of rising fuel prices, this is an important factor in aviation).

There are however benefits to the new airport. Due to noise, flights at LHR aren't allowed between 0000 and 0500, except in unique (normally emergency) circumstances. A new Airport in the Thames Estuary would be able to operate 24/7, which would create capacity all on it's own. Of course there is the pollution issue that Dave has mentioned, removing the flight paths over London would definitely benefit the health of many people living in London, however, as I've said before, as Aircraft are getting quieter and greener, both these problems may soon be a thing of the past.

(Just before someone says "Oh, but you don't have to experience this on a daily basis", I do. I have lived all my life under the approach and departure paths for Manchester Airport, and even took my GCSE examinations with Aircraft at about 700ft overhead every 2/3 minutes, so I know what it's like, and Manchester is a 24/7 Airport too )

we don't need more planes in holding patterns overhead

Can I just drag this out from earlier on in the thread? The aircraft don't hold over Central London, but instead in Stacks on the outskirts (in fact 2 are mostly outside of Greater London), see this image.

[orudge]

You often get some great views of central London when flying into Heathrow on a nice day though, I always enjoy looking out of the window and seeing what I can see.