Heathrow's connectivity and size gives it trump card for new runway

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/01/heathrow-new-runway-airports-commission

Version 0 of 1.

In the end, Sir Howard Davies didn’t offer a menu. No ifs, no buts . A north-west runway at Heathrow is the “strongest solution”, says the Airports Commission. Gatwick is described as “feasible”, but its drawbacks follow in the next breath – capacity would be focused on short-haul flights and the economic benefits would be smaller.

As it happens, this column has always veered towards the Gatwick option. It’s cheaper; the noise and air pollution would affect fewer people; it’s more likely to be built because the planning obstacles are smaller; and there would be a boost to competition between London’s airports.

But Heathrow, given the terms of reference, was always odds-on favourite. As Davies reminds his readers, the commission was required “to propose measures to maintain the UK’s status as a global hub for aviation”. If that was the brief, London’s biggest airport was halfway down the runway already.

To be fair to Davies, he flirted in his interim report with the idea that airport hubs aren’t as vital as the Heathrow evangelists claim. He wondered whether more point-to-point aircraft, a future in which there are fewer transit passengers, changes the game. He asked whether huge airports create hassle and inconvenience for passengers by their sheer size.

In the end, though, conventional wisdom prevailed. The trump card remains “connectivity” and, frankly, it is hard to deny that Heathrow wins on that measure. Gatwick has a credibility problem in attracting long-haul traffic. Only 11 routes outside Europe are served daily from the airport; even Vietnam Airlines switched to Heathrow when it had the chance last year.

The commission thinks Gatwick, to get into the connectivity game properly, would have to attract an airline alliance to the airport. Low-cost carriers might have to enter the long-haul market or structure themselves to feed others’ long-haul services. “None of these is impossible, but they would be a risky basis for any long-term infrastructure decision,” concludes Davies. It’s a reasonable view.

The argument, then, is whether the business lobby’s desire for more flights to deepest China and South America is really worth the environmental damage and aggravation to Londoners. Davies proposes a package of measure he thinks would help. You can understand how the noise improvements could work: if you’ve got three runways, you have more capacity to make services from Asia land after 6am.

The pollution safeguards, however, are not convincing. “New capacity should only be released when it is clear that air quality at sites around the airport will not delay compliance with EU limits,” says the report. Pull the other one. You are asking us to believe that, even after a new runway has been built at a cost of £17bn, its use could still be banned. That’s not credible. A straightforward ban on travel by car to Heathrow would be more effective.

In the end, of course, a new runway is a political decision. Many of us would happily live with expansion at Gatwick and accept the risks Davies describes. But the safer option – solely in terms of economic growth and more flights to more places – is Heathrow. On that point, Davies’ report is persuasive.

David Cameron has a choice: he can either do a U-turn on expansion at Heathrow or he can concede that “winning the global race” isn’t everything.