Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
In an ideal world, there would be a bit of headroom between the number of slots allocated and theoretical capacity of the runways (and the other airport/airspace infrastructure). In practice, planning to utilise 99% of that capacity during large parts of the operating day is inevitably going to result in delays, airborne holding and other inefficiencies, even on a good day.
Of course you can't blame airports that operate in the private sector for wanting to maximise shareholder value, revenue and profit by sweating their assets to the maximum. But anyone who thinks that adding more capacity while still planning to operate at an unrealistically high utilisation % is going to solve the problem, is living in a dream world.
It's not just maximising shareholder value, although this may well appeal to airport operators. But at key hubs like Heathrow it is in the prime carrier's interest (BA here) to have the place saturated, especially where they are allowed Grandfather Rights, as this prevents competitors coming in and assists yield. We have all seen comments that if the 3rd runway is built there, the likes of Easyjet would be applying for slots and routes, inevitably to places already served by BA. Indeed, if the 3rd runway were miraculously to be available tomorrow, BA (and American etc) would be falling over themselves with leased aircraft to fill it all up pronto to stop anyone else getting in.