One of the world's primary aviation hubs is saturated, and choices about its future have to be made soon - and with clarity
London Heathrow airport is a global aviation resource that needs attention. Don't just ask the London chambers of commerce if this is true, ask the US air transport industry that has obsessed for decades about improved Heathrow access, and may yet wonder why it did so when the US/European open skies agreement goes live next year and new American entrants discover just how limited the airport's resources are.
And it is not just the Americans for whom Heathrow is a key part of their route network. For the time being it remains the world's busiest hub for intercontinental air travel, but because it is working at 98% capacity under present operational regimes, the slightest disruption causes not just delay but cancelled flights. At that capacity level there is no slack to give delayed or interrupted operations a chance to get back on track.
The conflicting factors the UK government faces in making decisions about Heathrow's future render its task about as complex as decision-making gets. Not only that, but they are watershed choices. Judgements made about Heathrow's future in the next two years or so will have a significant effect on the UK's economy one way or another, and they will serve as a model - or a warning - for other governments that can already see the need to take similar decisions about their own resources in the near future.
All human life is there. Heathrow is one of the worst-sited airports in the world serving a major city. Since Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport closed in 1998 Heathrow has become the only world hub airport sited so that the prevailing-wind approach paths pass directly over the heart of the capital city within a few metres of the UK's centres of government and military headquarters. But that is an accident of history which the government is in no mood to change. Alternatives have been sought over the past 30 years, and some of them - like Thames estuary sites - have been mooted several times, but all the suggestions have foundered. There are, however, only two alternative courses of action for the government: develop Heathrow's capacity, or develop the other London area airports. Once there was a third way: to do nothing. But that stopped being an option when it disappeared from the consultation documents following the first stage in the process that led to the government's Future of Air Transport white paper.
It is also clear from the white paper that artificially constraining air transport growth beyond policies applied elsewhere in Europe is not on the cards. The economic advice the government has been getting from all sources, both academic and business, is that developing Heathrow to the limits of existing proposals is the option that provides by far the biggest advantage to UK plc. That point is not being ignored.
If Heathrow were given clearance for mixed mode operation of its twin parallel runways and also to build a third runway, the biggest single challenge would be to keep local air quality levels within European Union limits. HACAN Clearskies, formerly the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise, has just warned its members that there are signs that Heathrow owner BAA is pushing the government to fast-track the third runway. All this will become clearer in October when the Department for Transport has gathered all the research evidence, all the comments generated by the white paper, and runs a final round of consultation focused on Heathrow.
The airport's air traffic services provider NATS has just revealed that it has dropped plans - for the time being at least - to conduct trials at Heathrow on the behaviour of wake vortices. Their purpose would have been to validate procedures for applying time-based separation between aircraft on approach instead of distance-based separation, which would provide a potential improvement to the landing rate under certain wind conditions. NATS is clearly less impressed than Eurocontrol at the potential for time-based separation to improve runway usage, and is worried by the sheer difficulty of making it work safely. But NATS' main reason is that there is no point in running trials at Heathrow with its existing runway operating system if the government is about to clear it to run mixed-mode operations, which would invalidate the results.
The decisions about Heathrow's future affect so many people, companies and countries that the UK government must not delay them or fudge them.
Source: Flight International