Just to say that one of my close relatives lives in a house that is almost exactly under the centre line of approaches to and landings from the west at London Northolt about 8 miles out from the airport.
After the initial judicial review decision at the end of January they noticed that Northolt was suddenly awfully quiet for several weeks on end and that rather than the usual up to 15 to 20 landings a day there were only 2 or 3 at most (probably the handful of genuine military and government flights not potentially affected by the court decision).
However suddenly since the beginning of last week (commencing 9th March 2015) the number of movements has gone back to normal with up to 20 or so a day both in and out (40 in total but that's only on a peak day - on many days its only 20 movements in total). Tracking those that I can when I am there using
Flightradar24.com - Live flight tracker! (most of the civilian planes transmit idents giving their type and height but most of the military stuff is not picked up at all on the said website) also confirms that the civilian business jets are now very much back in business.
So perhaps RAF/Government were initially cautious but the CAA has now been along and come up with conditions/criteria declaring the airport safe for civilian business jets so long as the new additional rules re revised runway thresholds etc are complied with? And perhaps some additional markings or lights on the runway may even have been added.
I have to say that in the great scheme of things £20 million really doesn't sound like a very huge investment as military spending budgets go, especially if virtually all of it can then be recouped over the next five or ten years in additional civilian aircraft landing there. Up to now the movements have only been at around 6,000 per annum but the airport now has government permission to push this up to 12,000, which it has so far come nowhere close to achieving. This would effectively mean doubling up on the current number of existing civilian movements over the last few years.
Of course if as a result of London Oxford and Biggin Hill's temper tantrum the government now decides to go for broke and extend the Northolt runway to 7800ft by realigning it east to west with the A40 in line with the proposals at
Royal Aeronautical Society | Insight Blog | North by Northolt (no doubt they could cite a strategic military need for one London military airport base to be long enough to handle the majority of current narrow bodied civilian jet engined aircraft that might be requisitioned for military troop carrier use in times of major war etc, etc and also say that the existing runway length doesn't fit with even peacetime use by the military due to the greater runway lengths required by all modern aircraft) then ultimately these other two airports might sincerely wish that they had let sleeping dogs lie.
Quite clearly in the not too distant future London City is also going to hit maximum capacity for runway operations (at least until such time as it builds additional taxiways to stop the runway also being used for that purpose more than half of the time) and if Northolt has then been upspecced to modern standards the airport half way to Birmingham calling itself London Oxford and the Nissan Hutted affair at Biggin Hill simply won't get a look in.
As the Airport Commission doesn't appear to see Northolt expanding as part of Heathrow the new plan could instead be to expand Northolt as a standalone business jet hub for the time being and of course one day down the road the question of whether it couldn't say provide a fourth runway for Heathrow (after the current Northern one is probably extended over the M25 and split in two to provide the third one) for domestic and short haul European flights by connecting an underground railway and baggage transfer system might then be re-examined.
As Labour actually appears to be far more pro expansion of London's airports than the current coalition (but the Conservatives ultimately will probably adopt the same position as Labour if freed from a coalition with the Lib Dems) really anything is possible over the longer term of say the next 30 or so years. So long that is as London Northolt manages to avoid the alternate possible fate of being completely closed down and then replaced by a gaggle of depressing high density housing estates.
