Heathrow third runway decision overturned by Court of Appeal (Update: 16/12/2020 - Heathrow appeal allowed by Supreme Court)

[Howardh]

With some deliberate supporting policy, HS2 might shift the dynamic slightly in this. Manchester Airport will be about as close to Euston in journey time as Heathrow is to King's Cross via the Piccadilly Line at present...

Even better if Manchester airport was linked directly to Heathrow! But as you allude to HS2 could cut that journey to London to under an hour so cutting out the need to fly Manchester/Heathrow (making more slots available) and if x-Atlantic flights departed/arrived at Manchester and pax from the south-east looked at the time;
Now - Arrive at Manchester from LA - hour to clear immigration, reclaim bags, customs - on to flight to London (an extra hour at least waiting) + flight (1hr 10 appx) + train/tube into central London (30' - 1hr) = around 4 hrs.
With HS2 you take out that hour of hanging around and the journey into London = 1hr i/br/c and 1hr on HS2 and you are virtually in the centre of London in just over 2 hrs.
To me it makes sense, IF HS2 gets built, to shift many x-Atlantic flights to Manchester and try to tell the pax that time-wise they are better off.

 

[camflyer]

Maybe Birmingham becomes "London Heathrow Midland Terminal" and Manchester "London Heathrow North West Terminal"

 

[Skymonster]

13% of capacity in terms of the additional 222000 movements per year which would be provided by the third runway could come from a modal shift post-HS2, from domestic flights to high speed rail (exl. NI/IoM/Inverness/Channel Islands etc.).
Perhaps even more than 13%, when you consider an A320 on a domestic route with ~170 seats being replaced with an A350 on a medium/long-haul route with ~350 seats. So at face value, 25% of the future international capacity can be procured at virtually no expense to LHR, save for small-scale infrastructure required to accommodate larger planes, if the integration between HS2 and LHR is done right.

Which it isn’t - being done right. Hence the reason why the government now needs to step up to the plate and get HS2 rerouted VIA Heathrow, with protected connections between rail and air (and vv), and then ban domestic flights to Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

A very good decision today by the courts.

A very POOR decision by the court today given there is no realistic plan B. And a decision that will mean countless lives continue to be blighted by ground and airborne holding of aircraft.

 

[Skymonster]

Maybe Birmingham becomes "London Heathrow Midland Terminal" and Manchester "London Heathrow North West Terminal"

Not gonna happen. Not enough demand for point to point air travel to the UK regions from other countries, especially not long haul.

 

[Meole]

Schipol is an excellent hub for Manchester to feed into. far more useful than LHR. No need for any expansion in UK.

 

[InTheEastMids]

A very POOR decision by the court today given there is no realistic plan B. And a decision that will mean countless lives continue to be blighted by ground and airborne holding of aircraft.

This is either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what the court said. They did not pass judgment on LHR expansion. They ruled on a point of law, not policy. The Planning Act requires the planning authority (in this case Grayling as then SoS at DfT) to show that the decision is consistent with relevant policy. He had legal advice that he didn't need to consider the UK Government signature on the Paris Climate agreement. The court has ruled that his legal advice was incorrect...

DfT could appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court but has decided not to.

TLR version: DfT got duff legal advice. And even governments need to obey the rule of law

 

[Class 170101]

Luton expansion with a new terminal is on the cards, to make better use of the runway. Add in more expansion at Birmingham with HS2 connections, and you can just about cover the passenger growth forecast at Heathrow.

Stansted is always going to struggle to become a major airport due to its location. Same would apply to Boris Island.

I agree about Boris Island and also have concerns about you manage the wildlife there - and there is lots of it waiting to get sucked into aircraft engines, I'm sure we don't want to see a Plane land on the Thames, Hudson river style.

But as for Stansted I don't agree with you. Now that Heathrow is subject to more court action Supreme Court) over the 3rd Runway I would suggest that any expansion of flying for the next few years, if not until planes reduce their emmissions, will be at existing airports with unused runway capacity - that includes Stansted and as you have alluded to Luton. The other way will be via bigger aircraft to carry passengers per landing / take-off slot.

I think spreading the load around the country makes sense.
Especially make more use of Manchester and one of Glasgow or Edinburgh. Whichever more easier to develop

I expect you will have to develop all existing airports that have spare runway capacity.

 

[Skymonster]

How does expanding other airports instead of Heathrow address the concern over aviation emissions. More flights will create emissions whether they go into Heathrow, or Stansted, Luton Gatwick, Birmingham or Manchester?

 

[Bald Rick]

But as for Stansted I don't agree with you. Now that Heathrow is subject to more court action Supreme Court) over the 3rd Runway I would suggest that any expansion of flying for the next few years, if not until planes reduce their emmissions, will be at existing airports with unused runway capacity - that includes Stansted and as you have alluded to Luton. The other way will be via bigger aircraft to carry passengers per landing / take-off slot.

When the Luton DART opens, it will suddenly be a lot more attractive to many London based people than Stansted and even Gatwick. I’d expect Luton growth to outstrip Stansted substantially. The other major issue is that the local planning authority does not support Stansted expansion, whereas that at Luton does (albeit with a vested interest!), so the latter will find it easier to expand. I have a hunch that Luton will take some short haul flights off Gatwick (particularly from team orange) , which will enable the latter to resell the slots for more long haul.

I agree that Stansted will still be an opportunity, but it can’t escape from the simple fact that it is a long way from London and takes longer to get to than the other major airports.

I also expect Birmingham to capitalise, particularly for North America, but not for short haul.

 

[InTheEastMids]

I agree about Boris Island and also have concerns about you manage the wildlife there - and there is lots of it waiting to get sucked into aircraft engines, I'm sure we don't want to see a Plane land on the Thames, Hudson river style.

But as for Stansted I don't agree with you. Now that Heathrow is subject to more court action Supreme Court) over the 3rd Runway I would suggest that any expansion of flying for the next few years, if not until planes reduce their emmissions, will be at existing airports with unused runway capacity - that includes Stansted and as you have alluded to Luton. The other way will be via bigger aircraft to carry passengers per landing / take-off slot.



I expect you will have to develop all existing airports that have spare runway capacity.

Remember that Bristol airport expansion got kicked into the long grass in the last couple of weeks.

The point that people may be missing is that all planning decisions about airport expansion may have to follow this precedent. What kind of airport expansion is compatible with Net Zero?

 

[Aictos]

One point to remember with Heathrow is that every day it exports £183 million* to Non EU and Swiss markets which is far more than any other port in the British Isles.

Which over a year is around £66.8 billion of trade which is not to be ignored.

*Heathrow Trade Tracker Feb 2020

Therefore I don’t think we should do anything that would put that at risk and indeed as we leave the EU, we will become more dependent on trade though our ports and airports none more so then at Heathrow.

 

[Glenn1969]

The Airport say they will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court so this is far from over

 

[thejuggler]

The Airport say they will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court so this is far from over

Suggestions are while Boris is in charge it is kicked well into the long grass. The fact Government aren't appealing the decision show there is no desire for it.

Even if the case is won by Heathrow (are they to argue the Paris Agreement matters have been fully assessed, or they aren't applicable?), it still needs Government funding approving and stalling that for years is easy enough.

 

[Class 170101]

I agree that Stansted will still be an opportunity, but it can’t escape from the simple fact that it is a long way from London and takes longer to get to than the other major airports.

Currently around 47 minutes for Liverpool Street to Stansted Airport and 45 minutes St Pancras to Luton Airport via Parkway station with connecting bus, will Dart make that much diference other than being more reliable journey time wise than via bus with risk of road congestion?

Remember that Bristol airport expansion got kicked into the long grass in the last couple of weeks.

The point that people may be missing is that all planning decisions about airport expansion may have to follow this precedent. What kind of airport expansion is compatible with Net Zero?

Depends how literally it has to be followed I guess and whether a new / enlarged terminal would fall foul of Paris.

I wasn't aware of Bristol being rejected. I guess that might have further appeals ahead though?

It still needs Government funding approving and stalling that for years is easy enough.

I didn't think Heathrow expansion needed government funding?

 

[Bald Rick]

Currently around 47 minutes for Liverpool Street to Stansted Airport and 45 minutes St Pancras to Luton Airport via Parkway station with connecting bus, will Dart make that much diference other than being more reliable journey time wise than via bus with risk of road congestion?

Yep, post the DART opening, Luton will be advertised as 30 mins from London. Indeed it already is in the promotional material for the DART. From December there will be 2tph from St P that are first stop Luton Parkway in 19 mins, 2 minute change to DART (it’s a direct link off the footbridge) maximum 4 minute wait, 3 minute journey, 2 minute walk to security. Compared to a best Stansted time of 45 mins plus a good 3-5 minute walk from the station to security. Even Gatwick is about 35 minutes on the same basis, 40 if you are heading to North terminal.

 

[DerekC]

I think it's a lousy decision. I had much rather see Boris lie down in front of the bulldozer (and can I drive, please )

 

[Class 170101]

I think it's a lousy decision. I had much rather see Boris lie down in front of the bulldozer (and can I drive, please )

As long as he fills some pot holes.

 

[ABB125]

My dad made an interesting point about the 3rd runway yesterday. Building it will actually be better for the environment and reduce emissions, because there will be no need for planes to be circling around above London waiting for a landing slot. Of course, that only applies if the number of flights stays around the same as now, perhaps a small increase of 10-15% would be fine.
If Heathrow simply fill up the new runway with as many new flights as possible, it will of course be worse.

 

[Bald Rick]

My dad made an interesting point about the 3rd runway yesterday. Building it will actually be better for the environment and reduce emissions, because there will be no need for planes to be circling around above London waiting for a landing slot. Of course, that only applies if the number of flights stays around the same as now, perhaps a small increase of 10-15% would be fine.
If Heathrow simply fill up the new runway with as many new flights as possible, it will of course be worse.

As I said on another thread the whole purpose of the new runway is to increase the number of flights. By more than 50% as it happens (from a nominal 480k pa to 760k pa). And the majority of them will be larger aircraft.

 

[ABB125]

As I said on another thread the whole purpose of the new runway is to increase the number of flights. By more than 50% as it happens (from a nominal 480k pa to 760k pa). And the majority of them will be larger aircraft.

That's pretty much what I expected. How can they increase flights by more than 50% when they're only adding 50% runway capacity? Surely it would be sensible to have flights at around 80% of nominal capacity rather than 98% or something that it is at the moment, which would preclude more than about a 40% increase? (But of course, Heathrow can get more money by selling as many slots as possible.)
I personally don't mind if the 3rd runway doesn't get built, but if it does, it should be paid for entirely by Heathrow. I seem to think I read somewhere that government funding was needed?

 

[edwin_m]

My experience, admittedly only for short-medium haul and rarely using Heathrow, is that flights don't take off until they have a slot for their entire journey, and this can be predicted accurately enough that that type of flight rarely gets put in a holding pattern. Is this also true for longer-haul and Heathrow flights?

 

[Bald Rick]

That's pretty much what I expected. How can they increase flights by more than 50% when they're only adding 50% runway capacity? Surely it would be sensible to have flights at around 80% of nominal capacity rather than 98% or something that it is at the moment, which would preclude more than about a 40% increase? (But of course, Heathrow can get more money by selling as many slots as possible.)
I personally don't mind if the 3rd runway doesn't get built, but if it does, it should be paid for entirely by Heathrow. I seem to think I read somewhere that government funding was needed?

Government funding is ‘only’ needed for all the alterations to motorways / new rail links etc. Several billions worth....

Heathrow’s runways normally operate with one for landing and one for take off, principally because of noise. It is more efficient in slot terms to have a runway doing both, or rather, alternate take offs / landings. Hence why Gatwick manages 280k air traffic movements each year off one runway compared to Heathrow’s 480k off two. If Heathrow gets a third, landing and takeoffs will be mixed up more from one of the runways, meaning a more than 50% increase.

 

[Bald Rick]

My experience, admittedly only for short-medium haul and rarely using Heathrow, is that flights don't take off until they have a slot for their entire journey, and this can be predicted accurately enough that that type of flight rarely gets put in a holding pattern. Is this also true for longer-haul and Heathrow flights?

Right now, all 4 stacks for Heathrow have approaching aircraft in them, with a total of 6 long haul and 5 short haul (counting Beirut as the latter).

 

[daikilo]

In my opinion the biggest problem Heathrow has is its approach / departure flight paths. With the dominant westerly winds the approach is over central London and always has been. There is a technical solution which allows curved approaches, but it has not been implemented widely (and just shifts the problem elsewhere).

Also, even forgetting "domestic" connections, there is still a proportion of traffic which is passing through Heathrow without a stop-over. This is causing pollution on both arrival and departure and is avoidable either by using other hubs or direct flights. Not good for BA and Virgin but tough (BA is anyway trying to shift some of this traffic to Dublin and Madrid, not that I am suggesting this is good).

 

[jfollows]

The Times business leader, which I hope people will tolerate my quoting below, today observes that this judgement was predictable and, more importantly, that the runway expansion scheme has always been ill-conceived and unnecessary.

An opinion with which I agree completely.

I have always felt that airlines and airports telling us that things like "hubs" and "code share" are good for us are telling us huge lies - they do nothing for me and, I sense, many other travellers. No, they say these things because they're good for their bottom lines, they are things which are more profitable for them rather than better for their customers.

I've had the misfortune to use the BA Manchester-Heathrow service too many times, ironically the one time it might have been useful was when I had a meeting in Bedfont Lakes (within walking distance of Heathrow T4) but my employer at the time wouldn't allow me to fly, so I went by train from Manchester instead.

BA cancelled its direct Manchester-New York service about ten years ago, since when I use its competitors who provide direct services to the USA from Manchester.

BUSINESS COMMENTARY
Heathrow trouble is so predictable

Alistair Osborne

Friday February 28 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Grounded by hot air. And how fitting is that? We’ve had that by the plane-load from the backers of Heathrow’s “£14 billion” third runway: the airport’s bonus-driven boss John Holland-Kaye; Britain’s business lobby groups without an original idea between them; and, of course, Sir Howard Davies’s Airports Commission, the lot that blew £20 million of taxpayer cash on a last-century fixation with hub airports.

All that guff for something as predictable as this: Chris Grayling failing to account for the runway’s impact on Britain’s legal pledges over global warming. Who’d have thought our ex-transport secretary might deliberately forget all about the Paris Agreement in 2015? Or that he might then devise a National Policy Statement, approved by MPs, that “was not produced as the law requires”: the damning verdict from the Court of Appeal.

Still, let’s not pin all the blame on him. Britain’s been failing to build a third Heathrow landing strip since 1968, when Harold Wilson set us off on this flight path to nowhere. And for good reason: the project doesn’t stack up. The airport’s in the wrong place for extensive expansion: densely populated and encircled by one of the world’s busiest road systems. The upshot? It’s always too complicated to build. The latest bonkers incarnation involves diverting all 12 lanes of the M25. Try to imagine the chaos.

Who pays for all the disruption? Well, Heathrow’s never been clear on whether its investors would foot the bill. Or how much passengers would pay for a scheme that’ll make one of the world’s priciest airports even pricier. It’s already got an air quality problem, too. Sites around the airport breach EU nitrogen dioxide limits. So how exactly would an extra 250,000 flights and 50 million passengers a year help?

But Britain’s legal vow to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 adds a new complexity, as the Committee of Climate Change noted. Expand Heathrow and you “leave at most very limited room for growth at non-London airports”.

In short, it kills “levelling up”. An expanded Heathrow would embed a fresh monopoly, undoing the logic of breaking up BAA and sucking traffic out of regional airports: £43 billion of GDP-worth in the view of the New Economics Foundation.

So what to do? Well, having been saved by the judiciary he beats up, Boris Johnson has a way to dodge the Heathrow bulldozers for good. He could deliver enough extra capacity to 2040 just by working existing runways harder. And all for a fraction of the financial or environmental cost. A new national policy statement could let Gatwick use its relief runway for take-offs: a scheme it prices in the “hundreds of millions”. Stansted could be allowed to lift its annual passenger cap from 35 million to 43 million; Luton permitted its second terminal; and Heathrow allowed to lift its flight cap from 480,000 to 505,000 a year.

That’d spread the environmental burden, making capacity growth easier to offset locally towards net zero targets. True, it’d leave Mr Holland-Kaye with the tricky task of explaining to his investors why he’s already blown £450 million on a third runway always doomed to fail. But that’s his problem, not ours.

 

[Nick_C]

In my opinion the biggest problem Heathrow has is its approach / departure flight paths. With the dominant westerly winds the approach is over central London and always has been. There is a technical solution which allows curved approaches, but it has not been implemented widely (and just shifts the problem elsewhere).

As was suggested in the southern approach thread, Heathrow is, fundamentally, in the wrong place. In an ideal situation, any airport would be located on the axis perpendicular to the prevailing wind - so in the case of London, the prevailing wind is from the south-west, so the airport should be north-west or south-east of the city so that flight paths don't pass over the city itself. So the best place would be Milton Keynes...

 

[edwin_m]

As was suggested in the southern approach thread, Heathrow is, fundamentally, in the wrong place. In an ideal situation, any airport would be located on the axis perpendicular to the prevailing wind - so in the case of London, the prevailing wind is from the south-west, so the airport should be north-west or south-east of the city so that flight paths don't pass over the city itself. So the best place would be Milton Keynes...

See the Cublington airport proposal of the 1960s.

 

[Skymonster]

From heathrowexpansion.com

Following the announcement by the Court of Appeal this morning regarding the Judicial Review into expansion at the airport against the Government, Heathrow has released the following statement:

“The Court of Appeal dismissed all appeals against the government – including on “noise” and “air quality” – apart from one which is eminently fixable. We will appeal to the Supreme Court on this one issue and are confident that we will be successful.

In the meantime, we are ready to work with the Government to fix the issue that the court has raised. Heathrow has taken a lead in getting the UK aviation sector to commit to a plan to get to Net Zero emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris Accord.

Expanding Heathrow, Britain’s biggest port and only hub, is essential to achieving the Prime Minister’s vision of Global Britain. We will get it done the right way, without jeopardising the planet’s future. Let’s get Heathrow done.”

 

[158756]

Exactly. Crossrail will also help Luton.

It’s worth pointing out that since the terminal works were completed, Luton is experiencing passenger growth of around 10% pa, whilst Stansted is around 2% and currently falling year on year on a monthly basis.

I always found it amusing when Stansted would say, very publically, that they were the only London airport with spare runway capacity.

Luton has a problem in that it is rapidly approaching a capacity restriction imposed by the planning system. Luton Council are obviously not opposed to expansion, but based on this Heathrow decision environmental campaigners could give them a lot of bother in the courts.

 

[Bald Rick]

Luton has a problem in that it is rapidly approaching a capacity restriction imposed by the planning system. Luton Council are obviously not opposed to expansion, but based on this Heathrow decision environmental campaigners could give them a lot of bother in the courts.

They’ve exceeded planning restrictions on passenger numbers before, and no doubt will do again (very soon!). As has Gatwick.

In any event, the circumstances are different as Luton’s terminal expansion does not form part of a national policy statement. And they could well argue that extra capacity can be provided by more fuel efficient planes on a per flight / per seat basis. I suspect that total carbon emissions produced by flights to/from Luton have actually reduced in the last year, despite the passenger growth, because Easyjet and Wizz are both using a higher proportion of A320/1s vs A319s, and several more neos in the mix too. Plus Monarch and Thomas Cook have stopped flying with their significantly older (and thus more polluting) aircraft.