How leisurely it would be to go back to 4-mile spacing at Heathrow, as it was when I started back in the very early 70s! Four-mile spacing in the wind conditions we had yesterday would have given us a landing rate of around 30 an hour. Given that the traffic offering is over 40 for many hours of the day we'd end up at 10pm with about 100 a/c holding, either in our stacks or on the ground somewhere. I'm not altogether sure that the airline industry could take that. One answer is to run the place all night, then we could shift at least the same amount of traffic with 4 or 5 mile spacing..... but the noise freaks are mega powerful and they'd go bananas. (I'll bet there are some on here - I've certainly fielded irate phone calls from airline pilots complaining about aircraft noise. Can you actually believe it?)
Let's hope it's a quite afternoon today - Saturday usually is, thank God!