Justine Greening, the transport secretary says she is: 'determined to find a long term solution to Britain's airport crisis'.
I think we need to be careful with the usage of the term "crisis". As it currently stands, London still has 6 designated airports with direct links into the city centre, together with other pretenders like Oxford.
What we
do have is the pressure point at Heathrow - it has been running for many years at around 98% capacity, and there is very little that is going to change this.
We may or may not build a third runway there, but if that happens, it will fill up almost overnight by taking traffic which would otherwise stay at Gatters, and the "crisis" will still remain.
I respect KK MP for having the guts to propose demolition of half his constituency, but as a future pretender to the throne, he must surely know that this is a complete non-starter, therefore a risk-free approach to take.
For all the reasons we've discussed ad infinitum, an island airport is not a solution, especially as 2/3rds of its traffic is just going to be displacement anyway, hence the huge infrastructure costs which are going to need repaying, but which don't provide extra capacity.
It isn't sexy, it isn't ideal, but the most obvious and practical way for London to expand capacity is to add runways to its existing airports, and there is more space and less of a noise issue doing this at LGW first, then STN.
In the meantime, what we have is a "challenge", not a "crisis". London will not stagnate if it does not build a new island airport,
nor will it stagnate if it only gets a 3rd runway at LHR instead of a 4th. Even if we have to make do with a 2nd or even 3rd runway at LGW, it will
not be the end of London as we know it.
We have to admit that ours is a dirty industry, which is just as good at taking people
away from London as it is at bringing them
to London. The business passenger will always be able to fly where he or she wants.
If Easyjet get some routes displaced from Gatwick to Stansted and Luton, and MOL pulls a few Ryanair routes in a huff, are we really
that badly off?