The ideal would be to shut LHR and go massive at STN. It would satisfy many needs e.g. Noise and polution over a heavily populated area and reduce the danger of accidents over the same. From an ATC point of view it would free up a huge chunk of airspace and allow the TMA to 'breath' by reducing the interaction of routes between the airports. But it is politically unlikely.
If memory serves, each arrival into Heathrow gets an average of a couple of minutes delay. 230,000 arrivals each year adds up to a lot of holding and there is a significant environmental cost to that. Holding at low level burns much fuel and consequently adds significantly to the CO2 in the environment. Have the environmentalists considered that an additional runway would all but remove that completely?
It has been written that when a mid-air occurs it will most likely be in one of the Heathrow holds. It seems that a majority of the incidents happen there. A third runway would see their use all but disappear.
Heathrow needs a piece of airspace 40 miles by 25 miles to meet two runway capacity and it is now suggested they build 4 parallels just east of Detling? Where is it suggested we put the traffic that is already using that airspace and the airpsace which feeds it? From an ATC point of view, Cliffe is a non-starter.
Aside from all that and irrespective of the choices HMG makes for the future the issue of loading on LHR still needs to be addressed. O'hare has seven runways and uses 4 at any time, at a rate of 35 per hour. That is 140 movements per hour and about 75 m pax. Heathrow pushes nearly 100 per hour off is two available runways (96 is the recent record and that only contained 40 inbounds) and does about 62 m pax. O'hare (7), Schipol (5), CDG (4) and most of the other "majors" all have runway redundancy which protects their capacity from strong wind or closure.
In each of the last 2 quarterly bulletins from the Local ATC examiners there were in the order of 22 incidents in TC. Over 50% of them occured on just one of the 12 sectors - Heathrow and it is a growing trend. That ought to be sounding alarm bells loud and clear, but it seems nobody is listening.
The T5 enquiry was told that "just" 8 % additional movements would satisfy its needs. Where are they expected to go? Even if it were theoretically possible to fit them in where has the idea of a safety bolthole gone in this service that is supposed to put safety first?
As I said yesterday, on safety grounds alone LHR needed runway redundancy years ago and it is negligent of us to have ignored that. Lets hope we continue to get away with it.
Point 4
