Fixing Heathrow?

LONDON’S Heathrow is the world’s busiest international airport. It handles nearly half of the passenger traffic between North America and Europe. Connects the City of London to the rest of the world. Yet Heathrow is also the world’s most abhorred international airport. It suffers the worst flight delays and loses the most bags. Its endless security queues, rude staff and shoddy facilities plague passengers.

In anticipation of this month’s start of the “open skies” agreement between America and the European Union, other airlines are queuing up to fly from it too.

Heathrow ranks as the airport that does most harm to people living nearby. Thanks to its westerly winds and the east-west axis of its two runways, about 2m people in West London and neighbouring towns endure noise, air pollution and the small, ever-present risk of a catastrophic accident.

The government thinks this hell is worth it: the British economy benefits from having Heathrow as a competitive hub airport, because the more transit passengers there are—they have grown from 9% of the total in 1992 to 35% in 2004—the bigger the route network and the more valuable the airport is to Britons. But Heathrow will never be a desirable hub airport, because of where it is.

A new airport may yet be needed. But, in the meantime, there are ways of making Heathrow better. It is crowded because it is too cheap for airlines. Business travellers, who generate the most value for the wider economy, account for only a third of the airport’s passengers.

Competition between Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted would help too. Stansted, with a second runway, would suck in leisure traffic. The new owner of Gatwick, much better placed to grow than Heathrow, would have good reason to build a second runway after 2019 (when an old planning agreement expires), with the aim of attracting one of the big airline alliances—and thus becoming a hub itself. ( forbes.com)
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~ by londonweekly on April 3, 2008.