They shouldn't pretend it's a green thing but a nimby thing then.
It’s a green thing to not want all that pollution in the area.
Oh no!
Some of the A gates do fit larger aircraft. And not all short haul flights go from the A gates either; last two times I've gone from the B gates on a short haul.
And that makes it worse, to be quite honest. The evidence is that it's the early and late flights which are so damaging to people's health because it is the noise from those flights which disturb people's sleeping.
I mean, some of those regional connections may mean reduced mileage connecting through other airports. But BA could also propose an alternative of clustering service groups across two hubs - Gatwick for North America flights, and Heathrow for long haul to the rest of the world, with a HSR line connecting the two airports for high speed transfers.
They are supposed to be an internationalist party , not some greedy little Englanders, "pollution, but in others backyards"
I don't see the point of grouping North America flights to Gatwick. If I am flying to the UK from America, I don't want to connect to a flight to go back to America. I don't go to Gatwick and then decide which airport I'll fly to in America.
Because apparently a lot of the reason that they want to build the 3rd runway is because they want more capacity for connecting passengers through Heathrow. So Gatwick's wide range of connections would help onward flows to N America.
Gatwick doesn't really have many onward connections that Heathrow doesn't also have , and the ones it does have are low cost carriers that an American flying AA/Delta wouldn't be able to book as a connecting flight
Maybe it's time to change the idea that low cost airlines are unwilling to fulfill connections. Maybe that will remain the case with connections between their own flights, but if they operate a route that could be used as the last leg, it should be an option.
What mechanism does the British government have to force foreign airlines to interwork with other foreign airlines?
Gatwick tried it. A few years ago it launched a product that protected customers making connnections through the airport onto different [low-cost] carriers. It required booking through an airport-promoted website and paying an additional fee to protect the connection - essentially it was an “insurance” scheme that paid for rebooking / a new ticket onto a a follow-on flight if a customer missed a connection. It wasn’t a success.
The British government doesn't have any direct mechanism, but they have multiple options to make Heathrow slots scarce enough and force airlines into alternative plans.
This just proves why we need a proper plan to allocate slots at all London airports. It's ridiculous that we have an underused perfectly good airport at Southend, and yet we are considering ripping up another chunk of Middlesex to expand an airport, when you could have a 2 hub strategy connecting Gatwick and Heathrow, with a decent coordination scheme.
Sadiq Khan certainly would should he choose to...
You are complaining about "ripping up Middlesex" but your HSM25 High Speed Heathrow to Gatwick Railway would probably end up requiring more demolition
In contrast to the third runway proposal this is a deliverable plan to add passenger capacity and these investments will help economic growth.Heathrow Airport press release regarding terminal expansion:
Southend is out of the way for a lot of London, lacks good proper facilities and only has a handful of flights a day
How would it? If it followed the M25/M23 as much as possible, with tunnels to and from the airport, then it wouldn't have a significant impact at all. The aviation industry needs to learn that they will have to invest properly in a solution that makes use of the expansion at Gatwick, which will be much easier to implement in terms of impact on local residents.
No, the plan to expand Heathrow is based on greed and shortsighted planning. In the longer term, Gatwick could well add a third runway on the site of Lowfield Heath industrial estate, and you could offer so many connections with the combined capacity of Gatwick and Heathrow as they are.
They should build a railway to Gatwick. They could build a tunnel through the centre of London. Then you could have direct trains from Gatwick to Peterborough or Cambridge.
I think the greedy folk are those demanding to fly more and don’t care about poisoning Middlesex and collapsing the M25
Let's wait and see, because Gatwick has an application out for their 2nd runway....
Well, I suppose Heathrow is also adjacent to the other large London car park the M4, if you wish to claim that constitutes a decent transport connection to anywhere.
The actual airlines are pretty lukewarm about the idea, BA for example.
The market may have spoken, but that doesn't necessarily mean it needs listened to. The market would also quite happily have children working 80 hour weeks, fill the air and water with various noxious waste products, and sell us bread made with sawdust. We've decided that we'd rather tell the market to get stuffed in any number of respects.
AFAIK, a second runway at Gatwick serves an entirely different purpose to a third runway at Heathrow.
