Fairdeal:
Silverstrata, you keep stating that LHR will be sold or have to close, but you consistently fail to explain WHY Ferrovial (as owners of the airport) would be inclined to either sell or close the airport.
Jabird:
they would still have to be paid the market value of the site as a going concern + a premium. One hell of a purchase for a closure which would not be operationally compulsory!
Its called a compulsory purchase, or even nationalisation - an established political procedure. The whole of BAA is only about £4 billion (from October share sale), so about £2 bn would secure LHR. The development and sale of LHR would gain £12 bn according to Foster, but I think it would be more than this.
And if the Spanish don't want to get involved with part ownership of Silver Island, then the government ends up owning and operating (and later privatising) a huge public asset.
Jabird:
Also, for such a hub to work, it is likely that other airports might need to close too.
Possible, but unlikely. This is about 'Heathrow' expansion rather than stealing traffic from other London airports (stealing from AMS and CDG instead).
But if LGW and STN do end up with less traffic and partially closing, it's their own damn fault. They have been repeatedly offered expansion and more jobs over decades, and they have repeatedly said: "no we don't want any new investment, and we don't want any new jobs or any job security."
Ok, so if these regions want their primary employer to wither and die, and become unemployment blackspots, so be it - their choice.
Man7:
Sorry London but you are going to have to change planes for the first time in your lives ((not enough point-to-point flights from LHR))
And therein lies the problem. If the favourite Euro hub ends up as being CDG, AMS, or FRA, then business and their investments will gravitate there too. And while this would not have been such a calamity if successive government had not destroyed our manufacturing capacity, the UK's over-reliance on the City would mean that UK PLC would go bankrupt.
Can you just imagine a Germany that cornered the market in all of Europe's high tech manufacturing (as it already does), and then became Europe's primary financial center too. This would be a worrying financial and political dominance, I would say.
Flightman:
Are The Palm and The World islands sinking?
Not a good advertisement for that type of construction is it?
Jabird:
I don't doubt that an estuary airport is technically feasible, but we don't have much precedent of doing this in the UK.
As I said before, they did not bound the Palm Resort site with concrete, in order to make it look nicer. An engineering compromise too far, in my opinion.
However, if you can imagine something like the Brighton Marina filled with clean sand, you get the idea. Constrained sand is a very good construction foundation, as we have proved, and those concrete caissons at Brighton have stood for 40 years, and will easily stand for another 60.
And the construction technique for Silver-Boris Island would be the same as at Brighton - cast a caisson on top of the last one, then winch it out and drop it in. Tried, tested, quick and effective - and you just keep going and going until you meet your start point.
The bottom line here is:
Can LHR serve London, Britain and Europe for the next half century?
The answer is:
No.
So what to do? LHR is irreversibly constrained in:
noise,
departure and approach safety,
surface transport links,
flight transport links,
curfews,
runway numbers,
runway separations (for parallel approaches),
taxiway space and separation (especially with A380s),
Thus a new location is a must, and so there is no argument here. The only question, is where that new location should be. Silver-Foster on Grain or Silver-Boris Island?
.