Yet whatever challenges LHR faces, they are tiny compared to the big shiny new airport.
So I can only ask the same questions I asked last week:
1) How exactly is this place going to be laid out? Looks like 2 sets of runways pointing straight at each other.
2) How will you pay for Fantasy Island by releasing money from developing Heathrow, which is a private asset? Sounds like a big Ponzi scheme to me, and although there are plenty of other things I'd like to have a go at Boris about this week, he shouldn't be spouting this sort of thing without a challenge.
Exactly, in the highly unlikely event of collective madness from Heathrow owners and they sell it, the shareholders get the revenue, so how does anyone imagine that this would pay for Fantasy Island? Big Ponzi scheme is about right!
Maybe Silver has the answers?
Silver has never had any answers before, so don't count on it.
Sounds like a comment from someone who has lost the argument!
Runways end-to-end
I think some people here are getting a bit excited about the idea of having a runway end-to-end with another. It's really not an issue and is in fact one of the proposed improvements to LHR (http://heathrowhub.com/#sthash.dd9AdMMF.dpbs) aswell as being used around the world.
The missed-approaches simply turn away from the field immediately. Problem solved. And if you're worried about overruns and undershoots, well, you'd have to be worried everywhere then.
There are actual problems with this idea, however. That's why Sir Davies is getting paid a lot of money to pick the best of a bad bunch of options. For that then to be ignored by government :/
If there are no safety issues, there's still an obstacle: the end of segregated mode and alternation, because if this is retained, we have idle rwys and no extra capacity.