What do you do when your airport is old, crowded, and outmoded, but efforts to expand it get blocked time and time again? Obviously, you shut it down and build a new one on a man-made island. Duh!
Things have gotten so bad at Heathrow Airport that London mayor Boris Johnson has suggested shutting it down and building a new facility on a man-made island in the Thames Estuary, which leads into the North Sea. It's a recycled idea, but it's once again being considered as efforts to build a third runway at Heathrow stall.
Johnson envisions an airport built on reclaimed sand banks two miles off Sheerness, Kent, in waters 10 to 13 feet deep. With four working runways, the proposed airport would have twice the capacity of Heathrow, and proponents say that because all planes would take off and land over the sea, the new facility could run 24/7 without deafening a large portion of London's population. Depending on who you ask, a new airport would cost £7.6 to £13.9 billion, or £40 to £70 billion.
While a dozen cities, including Paris, Hong Kong, and Milan have relocated airports away from city centers in the last three decades, plans to replace or move Heathrow have been repeatedly blocked due to lack of funding or environmental concerns. One group claims that planes flying into an outlying airport would be more likely to suck birds into their engines, creating a safety hazard.
But Peter Hall, President of London's Town and Country Planning
Association thinks the time has come for a new airport. He says that
Heathrow, which was originally used as a base for Spitfires responding to German Luftwaffe attacks during World War II, is far past its expiration date. "Successive capacity crises have produced successive short-term patches," he writes in a UK
Independent editorial.
"Heathrow works badly and projects a terrible public face." He adds that the plan to add a third runway at a cost of £13 billion will be nothing but a temporary fix that eventually makes things worse.
Not surprisingly, the architect behind the new airport plans also thinks it's an excellent idea. "It's a great opportunity," Mark Willingale told the The Sunday Times of London. "The location is ideal for a new airport.
2M Group, a UK environmental organization disagrees. It say Great Britain doesn't need a new runway or a new airport, but a network of high speed rail lines that would replace many of the short and medium haul flights that are currently gumming up Heathrow. The group says it will block any efforts to expand Heathrow in the courts.
The brass at British Airways are also opposed to a new airport. In another UK editorial, BA Chairman Willie Walsh says that the idea is a horrible one, arguing that taxpayers would foot part of the £40 to £70 billion construction bill for the new airport. "Such a sum could never be raised from the private sector alone," he writes. "And how could the Treasury justify such investment when a large hub airport with good road and rail links already existed at Heathrow?"
It's sweet of Willie to stick up for the lowly taxpayer, but he neglects to mention that a new airport would reduce British
Airways' stranglehold on primo takeoff and landing slots.
Is it going to happen? Not likely. Governments don't have money to throw around these days, and by some accounts, the credit crisis has left the UK in worse shape than the US. A multi-billion GBP infrastructure project is a tough sell in the best of times, so how can it be pushed through with a recession looming?
It can't. Like a 747 on a crowded afternoon at Heathrow, this project will be delayed indefinitely.
Photo by Flickr user D' N' C
