Amazed that Justine has bought "a few clumps of grass" near LHR to "show solidarity" with the anti-expansion lobby and the so-called tree-huggers. It smacks of one of the worst examples of gesture politics of recent times!
Could it be that "transport secretary makes killing out of Heathrow compulsory purchase" doesn't make a good headline?
With reference to the LYS-CDG-EXT journey it's a pity that CDG cannot be avoided at all costs, it's a truly awful airport. Considering that it is purpose-built from scratch, there is no excuse. It's strange because the French are usually top-notch when it comes to infrastructure.
It's tragic that a LYS-LHR-EXT journey cannot be made. It's not just a question of a short hop (there were LHR-BHX flights 20 odd years ago), there is also the question of whether it is just the astronomically high cost of acquiring slot pairs that keeps non-LHR based UK airlines from operating thin domestic routes to/from LHR.
Put it another way, LHR had become a 4 runway airport back in the day and slot availability was not an issue, would there be a business case for connecting regional UK airports to the main hub, for example, BE feeding BA's long haul routes or WW feeding BD? Would the no-frills big boys have moved in?
Who knows in years to come, with increasingly unreliable journey times because of road congestion and rail overcrowding/engineering works, short hop feeder routes and thin domestic routes may once again become viable.
These questions would, of course, apply equally to a potential Shivering Sands (or should that be "SILVERing Sands"?) island airport.
As for transfer pax and their usefulness, from an airline point of view, they allow it to offer routes from its hub that may not be viable solely on origin-destination traffic. For example, would BA's BLR and HYD routes be viable without transfer traffic to/from North America? Would it be able to serve 20 or so North American destinations without transfer traffic to European destinations not directly served from there?
Transfer pax are good business and there are many carriers that would not exist without them. EK, EY, QR, SQ, etc., come to mind, but there are many others.