Friday 23 November 2007

Heathrow: Bigger and bigger, like a tumour.

Heathrow expansion is set to be given the goahead AGAIN.

First it was Terminal 5, now it is Terminal 6 and a third runway.

BAA has a monopoly on London airports, so this is a worry for me. Personally, I think Heathrow is totally in the wrong place. Flights have to cross London due to prevailing winds and the same winds mean fumes are blown across the Capital increasing pollution.

The current figures are 450,000 flights a year, rising to 700,000 with T6 and the new runway, but they say even that is only 70% of demand. This to me suggests an entirely new airport. The ideal location is out to the East of London in the middle of the Thames estuary. This will solve the overfly and capacity issues. The new airport could be linked to the Channel Tunnel and national rail networks AND an in-town check-in facility.

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Good call! Let's stick one in Ashford (how long is that to London by train?).

It does seem much better to have a ring of equally sized airports round London, rather than a monolith and a string of small ones, so they should be building up Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City. Not necessarily in that order.

BrianSJ said...

You could put it at Maplin perhaps>

BrianSJ said...

You could put it at Maplin perhaps>

Henry North London 2.0 said...

Actually there is one that would fit all of these things in Manston on the Isle of Thanet...
Its already big enough for Jumbos
Planet Thanet as one Margate resident used to say to me at Uni.

Ashford will be 38 minutes to London by train in 2009... Nuff said it'll be faster than the sodding heathrow express plus changing at paddington and getting to St Pancras