You all seem to have bought into the lhr propaganda that they are the sole airport for business. Expanding lgw will provide the competition the uk needs to keep airlines prices down. EasyJet will not be able to offer the same low fares from lhr as it will along with other airlines, have to foot the bill for that extra lhr runway along with the taxpayer. The bill is a lot lower for expanding lgw and no cost to the taxpayer.
I support expanding Gatwick, why are you conflating this with my support for expansion at LHR?
Most traffic at LHR is leisure, however yields are higher as is the proportion of business travel. No credible person is suggesting LGW does not have a good % of business travellers, what LGW does not have is many options for them to access global markets. They have TK and EK but lost QR and EY. They have Air Transat, Westjet and Rouge but no Air Canada mainline, most noticeably for an airport of it's size, no KLM, Lufthansa (they keep trying and failing), no Air France. Virgin have their leisure focussed routes at Gatters and their business friendly higher yield at LHR. BA almost has a different business model at LGW, long haul remains leisure focused, something that LGW is brilliant at. So I agree, expand Gatwick, but do so on it's own merits as above and not like GIP tried to do, pretending it would in any way become like LHR if LHR was constrained. That's simply not backed up by the behaviour of the market.
The bill is a lot lower for expanding lgw and no cost to the taxpayer.
Network Rail might disagree....
The bill is a lot lower but the cost benefit analysis favours LHR, the airport the airlines want to fly from. If Gatwick was the new Heathrow, Qatar, Etihad and the US carriers would be all over it, instead it's Norwegian, the successor to Laker, and there's nothing wrong with that.