Birmingham (UK) airport: runway length
 

Afternoon all,

I wonder if someone can help answer a question that arose from an article in this weekend's FT. It says: "Birmingham airport has capacity for 18m passengers a year and is investing £65m to extend its one runway, which will allow aircraft to carry enough fuel to reach the US west coast and Asia. Work is due to be completed by 2014." [my emphasis].

Is the part in bold in this statement correct? If Birmingham airport currently handles flights to Dubai and Florida, is the extra fuel needed to get to Los Angeles / San Francisco genuinely the 'restricting factor' (if I can call it that) in using the airport for those routes?

In other words, I am asking whether the runway length really imposes a restriction on the amount of fuel carried, thus affecting possible flight distances? The runway is already long enough to handle long-distance aircraft such as the 747 and A330/340....

Thank you for any clarification you can provide.

Nick

Being able to accommodate large aircraft doesn't mean that they can depart profitably, otherwise they would already do so. As a runway length increases, so does the maximum weight an aircraft can lift. The long haul aircraft you were referring to burn between six and 12 tonnes per hour, so extending a runway allowing an additional 60-70 tonnes to be lifted might be a good thing for the airport.

PM

In a nutshell, a fully loaded B744, with the required legal fuel reserves, flying to say LAX could not plan to use the present runway. It could take less fuel and make a stop en route which would increase the fare or wipe out any profits. The statement in bold is correct.