{"id":549,"date":"2016-10-10T15:35:50","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T15:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=549"},"modified":"2016-10-10T15:35:50","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T15:35:50","slug":"opinion-airports-saga-enough-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/lectures\/2016\/10\/opinion-airports-saga-enough-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: The Airports Saga, Enough is Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Heathrow,<\/a>
Heathrow, once the world’s busiest international airport, is now the byword for political indecisiveness.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Plaguing successive governments since the 1950s, the question of airport capacity in the South-East of England most brilliantly showcases the utter lack of modern British infrastructure planning and resolve. Let there be no doubt, this is a blatant political choice, and one that has cost us dearly. While Conservative, Labour and Coalition government ministers have played pass the parcel and continually kicked vital decisions into the long grass for more than half a century, Britain, for the first time in over 350 years, has lost the right to boast it being home to the world\u2019s largest international port (airport or seaport) to Dubai. While Heathrow growth has reached its two-runway slot capacity at 99% utilisation, Gatwick teeters on with being the short-haul, low-cost carrier fortress surviving on a single, slot-controlled runway, the world\u2019s busiest.<\/p>\n

In 2012, the then coalition government, appointed Sir Howard Davis to lead a Royal Commission (a special commission that governments cannot stop) with the remit of deciding on \u201chow best to maintain the UK as the world\u2019s most important aviation hub\u201d and to improve UK-wide connectivity. Thankfully, due to the specific remit and use of the word \u2018hub\u2019, even the most basic aviation informant could have saved the taxpayer \u00a320 million and come to the strikingly obvious conclusion that the UK has only one hub airport \u2013 Heathrow. Hub airport economics allow airlines with that modus operandi<\/em> to pool connecting passengers from a variety of destinations and enable these airlines to open new routes that would be unsustainable in a point-to-point model. Yet, as Heathrow swells, and as London is the world\u2019s largest aviation market, airlines have been dropping shorthaul routes to make way for more profitable international, longhaul service to emerging markets. This comes at the expense of UK connectivity. Heathrow, with its two runways, serves a mere seven UK destinations (down from 18 in 1990), while Amsterdam, the hub of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, serves 24 UK destinations with six runways that are not slot controlled (i.e. airlines are free to plan their flight times without consideration for space). It\u2019s very simple \u2013 Gatwick cannot be a UK hub because the low-cost carriers based there don\u2019t sell connecting services and don\u2019t fly to any longhaul destinations (i.e EasyJet or Ryanair). Heathrow, nearly exclusively houses full-service hub airlines, the largest being BA, that can deliver on opening up vital emerging routes to the British economy.<\/p>\n

Putting this unstrikingly blatant logic to one side, there is, of course, the matter of cost to discuss. The lack of capacity at Heathrow, in the view of the Sir Howard Commission, now costs the air traveller a premium of 10% to fly to or from the UK. Airlines, desperate to get into Heathrow to capture a share of the world\u2019s highest yielding traffic, have paid in excess of $75 million for a landing slot at the airport (as airlines are forced to own landing slots due to capacity problems). Less than 1% of airports possess landing slots (landing slots being unnecessary and free at most airports), and none of these are more expensive than Heathrow. This cost is, unsurprisingly, passed onto the consumer. There is then the economic cost of a half a century of delay. BIG, a business consortium, have estimated that each day expansion of Heathrow is not approved, that is eliminating \u00a36 million a day in economic growth. A third runway at Heathrow is estimated to contribute \u00a3211 billion to the economy and support an extra 180,000 jobs. Perhaps the happiest fact over the plans for Heathrow expansion, costing just over \u00a315 billion, is the fact that the taxpayer isn\u2019t picking up the tab. This is privately-funded infrastructure (most countries would bend over backwards for these types of investments)! Gatwick delivers nowhere near the same economic and connectivity benefits that Heathrow will. Make no mistake, I\u2019m not against Gatwick expansion at all. It needs to happen, but I\u2019m taking one step at a time for the slow acting government machine. Heathrow doesn\u2019t need 3 runways; it needs considerably more.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s eerily laughable that we, as a nation, haven\u2019t been able to build one runway in over half a century, when China is building 11 new airports in the next five years. When we compare Heathrow\u2019s nearly 75 million passengers using two runways to Paris\u2019 Charles De Gaulle Airport\u2019s 62 million passengers using four runways, it clearly demonstrates that we pale in comparison to even the most regulated societies in airport policy. Heathrow is one of the only airports in the world to have to adopt \u2018stacking\u2019 aircraft to wait their specified landing slot as there is no slack in the amount of arrivals. This usually involves circling over Greater London for an average of 18 minutes, all while contributing unnecessary carbon pollution to the environment, which were in excess of 280,000 tonnes of emissions from stacking in 2010. If there are unforeseen events, such as weather, Heathrow has no contingency to recover. The airports commission found that in 2014, Heathrow was unable to recover on 60 days through the year due to capacity issues, causing forced cancellations of flights. Not only is this inconvenient for passengers, it sets an unwelcoming image of a \u2018Britain of disruption\u2019 for foreigners visiting this country.<\/p>\n