TFL do not have an airports brief, it's simply a renamed LRT (London Regional Transport).
jabird, your analysis is spot on. A 4-rwy LHR makes rwy expansion at LGW unnecessary in the short-medium term, so "Gatters can deal with the crumbs" quite adequately.
Exactly right, Skipness One Echo, Boris has made the case for a 4-rwy LHR. Indeed the first 19 pages or so are a good-ish analysis, but the last 7 pages lose it big time.
A few examples:
The idea that if BA and/or VS won't leave LHR for Fantasy Island then a foreign airline will move in is nonsense: if BA stays at LHR, so will all the other airlines so as (1) not to lose competitive advantage, and (2) not to get stung by airport charges even more eye-wateringly high than those at LHR.
It maintains that Fantasy Island would be in an unpoulated area. For how long do they imagine it would remain so? Airport workers have to live somewhere nearby, they won't be commuting from Middlesex for Pete's sake!
It rightly criticises the New York airports system for too many rwys too close to eachother and, consequently, too many delays. Fantasy Island (intended to be much bigger and busier than LHR) would replicate this because of the relative closeness of LCY, MSE, SEN and STN. This means 8 rwys in the area (not all parallel) rather than 4 at present. Air traffic have stated that this is untenable.
Any attempts to "run down" or close LHR as suggested in the report (or SEN, MSE, LCY or STN for that matter) would certainly be very expensive and probably illegal. It would doubtless result in years of litigation and so will probably never happen, and that means that Fantasy Island is unviable.
Silver, what do you think?