120.4
The ideal would be to shut LHR and go massive at STN
I think that we are all agreed that LHR is in the wrong place but going 'massive' at STN is surely only going to blight a different area of the South East.
I think that we have just got to get used to the fact that in the UK we do not have vast amounts of available land for these mega airports. We have inherited a situation where most of the major international airports are concentrated in the most populated and congested part of the country and will have to do the best with what we have - even if this means dropping out of the race to have the biggest/best airport.
I would take a lot of convincing that an extra runway at LHR would be necessary just to allow redundancy for the amount of available slots - if we had another runway you can be sure that movements would soon increase and we would be back in the same unsafe situation but with 3 runways.
If there is an unsafe situation due to the amount of movements, then surely slot resrictions are the answer - then maybe the airlines may be persuaded to offer more services from the regional airports.