Gatwick should win in a shoot-out with Heathrow
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Version 0 of 1. It was generous, or plain weak, of Sir Howard Davies to give Boris Johnson a second chance to make the case for a super-hub airport in the Thames estuary. Either way, the chairman of the airports commission is clearly deeply sceptical on fundamental grounds like expense (up to £112bn, his report said), environmental damage, legal risks and the shift in the economic gravity of the UK. Damning with faint praise, Davies called the estuary idea of Johnson "imaginative". It will be studied "in case" it is a serious option. He doesn't sound keen. For practical purposes, then, it looks like a shoot-out between Heathrow and Gatwick in the eyes of the commission. The view here remains the same: if we're in the business of fudge and making use of existing infrastructure, the next new runway should be built at Gatwick. The case for Heathrow, as with the Isle of Grain proposal, rests on the idea that the south-east needs a single hub airport to make frequent flights to Hyderabad, Hanoi, deepest China, etcetera, economically viable. There is clearly some force in that analysis, even if Heathrow's owners have been hamming up their argument by claiming there are 26 emerging markets destinations served daily by other European hubs but not by Heathrow. The commission found that six of the 26 are services to second-tier airports in Poland and five are short-haul leisure destinations; all are served by services from other London airports. But the disadvantage of a single hub is that it comes to dominate everything. The Davies report sensibly notes that not everybody shares the flag carriers' obsession with hubs. Low-cost carriers, who rely on low-cost airports, are eating larger slices of the business travel market. Armed with new aircraft capable of flying point-to-point, they could make serious inroads into the transatlantic market. If that vision is credible, then expanding Heathrow seems likely to undermine competition and limit choice on many routes by pushing up fares. The audience of top-end business travellers, deprived of the odd flight to Seoul and Jakarta, may grumble. But it is perverse to force an ever greater number of polluting flights over west London if a lot of the traffic could be directed to Gatwick. The moratorium on expanding the Sussex airport expires in 2019 and the owners think they could have a new runway in operation in 2025. It is the option that imposes extra noise on the fewest people, which is surely the biggest argument in its favour. Heathrow would be free to continue to ply its trade as a premium hub airport catering for transit passengers. But Gatwick, with the help of improved connections to central London, would provide stiffer competition. Encouragingly, Davies has not swallowed the attempt by Heathrow to frame the debate as a "hub or no hub" argument. Gatwick is on the shortlist – and deserves to be there. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |