Originally Posted by
Heathrow Harry
Protesters have spent years fighting against Heathrow expansion Heathrow's current, third runway proposal would stop flights between 11pm and 5:30am. That's the biggest change for decades. In reality, it would mean the six flights that now touch down between 4:30am and 5:30am would be pushed a little later, to arrive between 5:30am and 6am. So, you'd still get 16 early flights, they'd just all arrive in the half-hour before 6am, give or take a few minutes.
The BBC have failed to allow for the variation between summer and winter schedules.
It's true that in summer there are only half-a-dozen flights scheduled up to 5:30am (out of the 14 or so pre-06:00 arrivals). But it's a completely different story in winter, with 14 out of the 18 night quota flights being scheduled to arrive between 4:30am and 5:30am (because our clocks go back, but they don't in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, etc).
You can't land 18 heavies in 30 minutes during night-time single-runway operations, and if the plan is to start TEAM (dual-runway approaches) from 5:30am, that will go down like a lead balloon among local communities, presumably why they are keeping very quiet about it.