New Thames Airport for London

[Nick Thomas]

On post 95 SS claimed an asking price of £60 billion for Heathrow and now he says £40 billion. Both are far too high. As Gonzo correctly points out there is a huge difference between £10 billion for a new airport and £40 billion for Heathrow. If SS was right Heathrow's current owners would be determined to move to Boris Island.
All the costs mentioned by SS are pie in the sky, and he has no idea of all the on costs of redeveloping Heathrow. In an earlier post 105 I explained why his estimates for selling Heathrow were so far out. Maybe thats why he reduced the expected yield from Heathrow.

[Honeybuzzard]

I think not

No new airport will be built in the UK. Too expensive, no room, we will soon need every available bit of land to grow food, and what will the aircraft be powered by in say 2020? not Jet A1, as oil production will have peaked. Combined Airships/Aircraft may be ready by then, and will not need runways.

[Barling Magna]

I agree that no new airport will be built in the UK, certainly not in the Thames Estuary, but otherwise you're wide of the mark. Aircraft will be using Jet A1 in 2020 and for a considerable time thereafter. Peak oil makes assumptions about likely new oil reserves. I remember sitting in a lecture in 1972 being told that oil production would peak in 1985 and run out by 1995..... In the same year The Club of Rome predicted a complete collapse of fuels and commodities by the year 2000. These things have not happened, nor will they. Human ingenuity is such that every crisis will be overcome - necessity is the mother of invention. Great strides are being made in fuel-efficient engines and in alternative fuels, so that some time in the future oil won't be used by jet airliners, but it will certainly be more than nine years before that happens. As for commercial airships, well they've been predicted for decades too......

[FlyingEagle21]

If a new Estuary Airport is built. It would need full industry backing.
For it to become a hub, Heathrow would have to close. The transition would need to be well thought out. The transportation links to the new hub would need to be world class and no less. If it's going to be done, it has to be done properly.

[MAN777]

New airport won't happen.

Too much invested at LHR for it to close.

Too expensive to build.

Too damaging to the environment to build.

No workforce living near.

Wont be liked by all the HQs that are in the west of London.


Yes Heathrow is full and potentially loosing out to European airports but so much more could be done here in the UK before we start covering our small country with yet more South East centric concrete.

Why can't London airways be encouraged to show an interest in the regions again with mini hubs being set up again (as LH does in Germany) at Birmingham and Manchester.

If BA needs new slots to expand into emerging markets why not offload some of the overcapacity (US flights for example) to the regions and release those slots for those new flights.

Another big problem that an earlier poster touched on was "What will all these aircraft at this new airport use as fuel in the future ?" Can we really risk such vast sums of money on a project and industry that may not exist soon ?

I for one am going to live in a cottage next to the sea, live on fish and home grown vegetables, use a wind turbine and batteries for power, old chippy oil in my LR Defender and shoes made out of recycled tyres !!

I don't really give a toss what you do

[silverstrata]

Gonzo

Hang on.......You say it will cost £10bn to create this new airport, and yet you expect to get £40bn from the sale of LHR?

If the cost of the Thames barrier, island and the road and rail links are placed in their true bugetry pidgeonholes, then the cost of a terminal and a slightly larger island for the runways could easily be accomodated within £10bn.

London is going to need a new Thames barrier, in the next 10 years anyway, before it becomes the new Thailand, and sinks gracefully under the sea. And the new roads go without saying .... as they say in the People's Judaean Front.

Man7

Yes Heathrow is full and potentially loosing out to European airports but so much more could be done here in the UK before we start covering our small country with yet more South East centric concrete.

That's the whole advantage with a Thames airport - nearly nothing gets covered in concrete, except a silty estruary. And don't blame aviation for destroying the UK's open space and wildlife, blame the guys who allowed the UK to be invaded. Strange as it may have seemed to the brain-dead politicians, but all these new people wanted somewhere to live and somewhere to drive. Strange that...

Man7

Another big problem that an earlier poster touched on was "What will all these aircraft at this new airport use as fuel in the future ?"

An easy problem to solve, if we did not choose brain-dead idiots for politicians.

Aviation is one of the few energy users that cannot be easily changed - not until someone does something radical to battery design. So fuel should be hoarded for aviation use.

As to (nearly) everything else, the nation can go electric. Not with those renewable fantasies, promoted by Dave "where-did-my-roof-turbine-go-to" Cameron, and his Watermelon chums, but by Thorium power. There is some 10,000 years of Thorium power, easily available - it is one of the commonest of the nuclear power sources, and inherently safe (the decay elements are short life, and you cannot turn it into a bomb).

Heating will be electric thermic pumps (a fridge backwards), which are clever designs that can deliver up to four times the input energy. Vehicles can also be electric - we are not there yet, with battery energy density, but getting there. Its a shame that, since this is the major technology gap mankind has, not one brain-dead politician has launched a major initiative to discover better energy stores.

Oh, and Thorium has no CO2 emissions, which may be a problem. CO2 is plant food, and the greatest determinor of crop yields, and so we may need CO2 generators to keep our populations fed. (Don't believe the warming cr*p that the Watermelons keep telling you about, that is simply a political gambit aimed at creating a One World Government. With the PDO turning negative and the Sunspot cycle in a funk, we are likely in for a cooling period of 30 years.)


Keep smiling - we may one day insist that politicians are picked from the brightest, and have actually done some real work before they are elected. But then one day pigs may fly and Lo-cos may put safety first......


.

[PAXboy]

It has been fun to read this thread ... before asking a couple of points let's say together: "Calm down, dear, it's only a political PR exercise to make it look like they have the vision thing."

I state: NO NEW AIRPORTS IN THE UK IN THE NEXT 50 YEARS!! The reasons are all clear:

The Thames/M4 corridor is only there BECAUSE of LHR. If they thought that they COULD ditch LHR, who would pay BAAplc for T5 and the revamped T2, which would be costed over a (minimum) 20 year life span? Even converting them to other use would cost a bomb.

The airline biz in the UK has already been changed in the past 20 years by:

• Deregulation of Europe and elsewhere
• LoCos
• Privatisation of airports and carriers
• The 2007 financial crash and recession - which has another 20 years to run
• The emergence of Emirates and the other mid east carriers
• The Euro hubs of FRA, CDG + AMS have already taken most of the hub traffic and it ain't gonna come back no more, no more
• Carriers are able to use direct, long thin routes, in a way that was not open before.
• Just how much are all the carriers going to have to pay to support operations at this field? In order to do so, they would HAVE to leave one of the others (STN/LGW) and how much spare cash have the carriers got to invest in starting up, and moving to, another major field in the South East of this tiny country?

And so it goes on. There will always be a need for a 2nd runway at LGW (which will not be built) and a 3rd at LHR (which will not be built). They will not be built for the same reason that this will not be built. No UK govt has the money or the b@lls to make it happen.

silverstrata

Now I know that is what New Labour wanted for the UK, to undermine the fabric of the nation for Marxist ideological reasons, but it is not what the people of this country want.

Eeer, NO. New labour was nothing to do with Maxist ideology! It was to be the new govt in power and then turn the New Labour people into part of the establishment in a dazzling move of upward social mobility and money.

SS also stated:

The point is that a much larger airport, that is not capacity restricted like LHR, would not have to reduce traffic flows during Low Vis opps. Had this recent fog blanketed a much larger Thames airport, there would have been no flight cancellations.

So - what makes you think that they would not do the same as EGLL?? That is, over sell the landing slots beyond the capacity of the field, so as to make more money? If the UK govt limited EGLL's slots, then they could handle the days with problems more easily - but that ain't gonna happen!

indie cent

How can we, as a nation, be seriously proposing that we can justify cutting swathes across the entire country to build a double hi-speed railway (which is long overdue anyway), but not a short one-mile strip of concrete to alleviate the 20 stacked disaster that is Heathrow.

Well said! But this sketch of a non-existant airport is not being proposed by 'the nation' You are forgetting that politicians need to have a result visible in the press for a week and the polls for a maximum of four years. Modern politicians have no interest in the future.

[jabird]

Why can't London airways be encouraged to show an interest in the regions again with mini hubs being set up again (as LH does in Germany) at Birmingham and Manchester.

Essentially down to hypotrophia (although I can currently only find reference to that term in medical use, I am sure it equally applies to geography ) - basically London and Paris are enlarged significantly above their next nearest cities, both in terms of population, and their status as transport hubs. Why do people want to live in London? Because everyone else wants to live in London, because many sectors of the economy are centrered on London, therefore more people move to London, and so on.

This simply does not apply to the structure of Germany, where there are 5 or 6 major cities, each performing well in certain sectors.

When it comes to aviation hubs, the tendency of hubs to suck in more traffic, and in turn to create more demand for routes means that airlines want to be at Heathrow, if they can get the slots, and after that, they will settle for another London airport. The power of the network has a squared relationship with the number of routes offered - therefore, whilst non-UK airlines will often open new routes from BHX, MAN, GLA etc in to their own respective hubs, none of these airports has significant appeal for a hub and spoke operation (as opposed to the low cost bases they can sustain quite happily)

SS,

If you had a little more knowledge about the airline industry (low costs airlines being dangerous), I'd consider debating your AGW conspiracies, in the mean time, I'm still trying to work out how LHR can be sold for more than the cost of building a new airport.

[Bagso]

FACT

There is not enough airspace above the South East to build a new airport, we can pontificate about doing all manner of things and factors but at the end of the day there are too many conflicting app/dep routes into the South East that will restrict ultimate capacity.

Close down Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City, Northolt, Biggin , Farnborough etc build a new airport , 8 runways with "uniformed procedures" and there "might" be a chance, otherwise forget it......!

...And when you have a single daily MAN-ORD service making more money than the multiple combined daily LHR-ORD services, something is seriously screwed !!!

[sellbydate]

So then, lets get this right, when Heathrow closes to allow for the use of the new Thames Estuary super-hub, the next airports up the road serving the north/west of London and the tens of millions who want to be that side of the capital would be......Wycombe/Booker International, White Waltham Metropolitan, errrr, aha, got it - London Oxford Airport!!!

It's a conspiracy, Dave wants to move an English Parliament to Oxford, just like Charles 1st and Hilter thought that was a rather good idea.

[silverstrata]

.

The Thames Airport is back in the news this morning (Tuesday) with a big article in The Times. This is a link to the front page, but this will change after today:

The Times | UK News, World News and Opinion

Unfortunately the full article is behind a paywall, but hopefully the other papers will pick up the story tomorrow.


.

[sellbydate]

and (ironically) Lord Foster appears to have been in Oxford last night giving a lecture on his grand vision for London - see link below

Lord Foster Reveals Further Developments for the Proposed Thames Hub

[silverstrata]

Paxboy

Eeer, NO. New labour was nothing to do with Maxist ideology! It was to be the new govt in power and then turn the New Labour people into part of the establishment in a dazzling move of upward social mobility and money.

Errr, No.

How on earth do you promote social mobility, by destroying grammar schools? They were the only institution in the country that would take any bright student, no matter what their economic background, and propel them into top positions and into government (like Thatcher and Major and many of the Labour Cabinet).

Clearly the destruction of the grammar schools, was designed to deliberately lower social mobility - and make people more 'equal' (but more equally ignorant, rather than more equally educated. An ill-educated population are easier to control).

And the ignorant masses are easier still to control, if they are all sucking on the Government teat - this is why welfare payments were increased so massively (to almost all income brackets), and why the civil service expanded by over a million.

.


And the reason for doing this?

John Reid was a former Marxist.
Charles Clarke was a Marxist, spending time in Cuba.
Alistair Darling was a Marxist.
Alan Johnson was a Communist who liked to think he was a Marxist.
Perter Mandelson was a Young Communist.
And more worryingly, the two Milliband brothers are sons of Ralph Miliband, who was a very prominent 1950s - 80s Marxist.
The Defence Secretary and the International Marxist Group - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog




This is partly why the Labour government jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon. When Communism collapsed in the late 80s, there was widespread despondency that the goal of world Socialist/Communist domination had ended.

However, a number of Marxists jumped onto the Green bandwagon and took it over, which is why the Greens are now looking towards a world government (to look after the planet, of course), that is distinctly Communist (the rich nations must give to the poor nations; wealth in terms of energy usage must be heavily taxed; and we must all live in mud huts).


This is why the Greens are called watermelons - Green on the outside, and Red on the inside.


Why does this matter to a new London Airport??


Because a key goal of these Marxo-Greens is to set up a world government, and make all nations and people equal (Communist). This means the West must regress back to the economic and educational standards of India and Africa. As a part of that regression process, New Labour did not build any:

roads, railways, docks, power stations, nuclear power stations, power distribution lines, cities, factories, spaceports, research institutions, national projects, new designs of aircraft of technologies, industries - and, of course, no new airports.


But there was a huge drive to flood the nation with immigrants, because a divided nation can never be a strong nation that can resist Marxist subjugation (the standard political philosophy of Divide and Rule). So there, in a nutshell, is why we have such atrocious airports in the UK.


.

[MAN777]

Why this "we must compete" with CDG, FRA, AMS mentality. What is wrong with Londoners having to hub for a change, it is after all what everyone else in the UK has been having to do for years.

I don't believe this headlong rush towards more and more runways is sustainable and as a UK tax contributor I certainly don't want tax spending on this hub domination madness.

[TSR2]

Growth Restriction by Capacity ?

One of the options to reduce the carbon footprint of aviation in a new DfT report, is to delay building any new runways beyond 2050. This is based on a 25% downward revision of expected growth in passenger numbers between now and 2030 based on several factors including the recent decision not to build new runways at Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted. The report suggests that the revised growth figures are achievable using existing runway capacity.

Source : Airliner World - December 2011.

[stormin norman]

If we cannot build a extra mile of tarmac at heathrow or Gatwick what chance of a new airport anywhere?

It took 10 years of planning meetings before building commenced to get a terminal built at Heathrow so i cannot see any new airport being built in the lifetime of anyone presently breathing in the uk.

[Skipness One Echo]

I don't believe this headlong rush towards more and more runways is sustainable and as a UK tax contributor I certainly don't want tax spending on this hub domination madness.

The value of inbound tourism spending taking advantage of the larger number of direct flights available is the key driver, along with the obvious fact that London has a much greater proportion of people flying on business who need the critical mass and frequency of a hub.

Wasn't building runway 3 at LHR a privately financed project?

[Nick Thomas]

SS
Now we know your reason for being so keen on a new airport: It's so you can post your anti New Labour rhetoric. In case you haven't noticed in LA, New Labour have been out of power for 18 months. Also any self respecting Marxist is (like you) anti New Labour.
What ever your views; producing a flawed business case for this development is not helping your argument.

[commit aviation]

Having just listened to the Chancellors Autumn Statement he did make brief mention of aviation & that everything would be considered apart from a third runway at LHR.

"And we will explore all the options for maintaining the UK’s aviation hub status, with the exception of a third runway at Heathrow."

Cue more reports, hot air & little or no progress then....

[LGS6753]

...but the National Infrastructure Plan he referred to mentions specific road improvements around Birmingham, Luton and Manchester Airports.