I met Sir Howard in person on 3 July when I was able to outline, at length, my concerns at Heathrow expansion in person. I add this written submission to explore a few further points.
As Member for Parliament for Hammersmith & Fulham since 2005 and Chelsea & Fulham since 2010 as well as a local Fulham resident since 1990 aircraft noise is a regular source of complaint in my constituency.
Chelsea & Fulham, like many other areas across west London, must face, on a daily basis, more than a thousand planes coming in to land at Heathrow. This includes night flights which land before 6 am and disturb the sleep of a number of residents every night.
With the disruption the airport currently causes my constituents, which I will outline in my submission, I do not believe there is a case to build a further runway at Heathrow when more economic and less invasive solutions to our nation’s airport capacity problem are available. Indeed, I note that Heathrow Airport proposes an increase in annual air movements from 480,000 per annum to some 740,000, an increase of more than 50% on top of an already intolerable situation.
A ‘Distributed Hub’
The debate over increasing airport capacity has primarily focused on three proposals. Building a third runway at Heathrow; an extra runway at either Stansted and/or Gatwick; or a new hub airport located in the Thames Estuary.
However, like New York City, I believe that London can have three or more major international airports, which do not necessarily have to be ‘hub’ airports. In New York, La Guardia Airport serves destinations within the United States while JFK and Newark have a mixture of domestic and international routes. Newark is something of a ‘hub’ for Continental Airlines, but not their most important one.
An additional runway at both Gatwick and Stansted on top of the two runways currently at Heathrow might address the capacity problem for decades to come, in my view.
The owners of Heathrow currently argue that Britain requires one ‘mega hub’, based at their airport, which can pool demand from across the country in order to fly to emerging markets. They argue that to do otherwise would leave the country economically damaged and lagging behind other airports on the continent in offering routes.
Here, the evidence is mixed. Looking at the ‘BRICS’ countries as a leading indicator of connections with the developing world, Frankfurt does have presently better connectivity with Russia, and marginally with China, but Heathrow is surperior on connections with India, South Africa and Brazil. This is even before considering some of the connections offered by London’s other airports to important developing world destinations.
Heathrow currently offers flights to four destinations in China, having this year added Guangzhou, with Gatwick also providing a route to Beijing. Eight cities in India are also accessible from Heathrow with routes to Vietnam and Russia added in recent years to Gatwick’s portfolio.
The addition of these routes show that airports can adjust when demand increases even when close to capacity. More importantly, new routes have not been focused on Heathrow but also on Gatwick, dispelling the myth that flagship airlines do not wish to fly into London’s other airports.
To support possible expansion at Gatwick and Stansted, more should be made of our current infrastructure with the aim to cut travel time to central London and to each airport. In addition, connections to other transport modes such as Crossrail, HS2 and the Underground will be of benefit to all Londoners, not only airport passengers visiting the Capital or transferring flights.
The Future of Flying
International air travel is changing. The launch of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A380 show two very different visions of how passengers will travel in future. The long-range, lower-seat number, Dreamliner is a point-to-point aircraft which is designed to take passengers from regional airports direct to their destination. Such an aircraft makes a hub less meaningful as there is no need to transfer passengers on board.
To date 800 Dreamliners and 617 Airbus A350s have been earmarked for service on long-haul routes. In contrast, only 260 of the bigger A380s have been ordered which are primarily designed for use to hub destinations.
Expanding Heathrow and creating one ‘mega-hub’ does not appear to be the direction airlines or air travel are expanding in. Passengers, in general, wish to travel from a nearby airport and onward to their final destination, not through a hub airport. The A350 and the Dreamliner appear to cater to that desire. It is therefore not obvious that there is a need to build a third runway at Heathrow, with such uncertainty over the future need for hubs.
Heathrow’s shortcomings
The issue of Heathrow’s current location was perfectly illustrated to me on a British Airways flight I came across a comment in the in-flight magazine, BA High Life, May 2013, from a pilot who wrote how ‘I always enjoy flying over London, because there are so few approaches over cities.’ No other major city in the world allows aircraft to over-fly it in the same way as London and it is Londoners who pay the price with noise pollution and the constant, if small, safety risk posed by aircraft.
As a constituency MP I have received correspondence from hundreds of residents who have been woken by flights early in the morning or had their evenings or weekends ruined by noisy aircraft. More than 766,000 people suffer considerable noise from Heathrow, which amounts to 28 per cent of those impacted by aircraft noise in Europe.
An additional runway at Heathrow would, of course, mean additional noise over west London and thus more disruption for my constituents. I understand that current proposals envisage a new flight path would create significant noise over Sloane Square and the Earl’s Court area and, in total, blight three million homes across the Capital with noise from aircraft. When alternatives are available I find this proposal to be unacceptable.
Expanding Heathrow would also increase the risk to Central London of aircraft accidents. Thankfully, aviation disasters are very rare and this country has an excellent airplane safety record. However, accidents do still occur and should aircraft collide over Central London or be destroyed by a terrorist device the effects on the ground, as well as in the air, would be devastating. The Lockerbie disaster in 1988 and the Air France Concorde crash in 2000 showed the consequences of an explosion or crash in a built-up area and the resulting tragic loss of life on the ground. To continue to fly aircraft over London is an error which would be compounded by the addition of another runway and the corresponding rise in aircraft numbers.
Considering the detrimental environmental impact and the safety risks expanding Heathrow is not a long-term, viable solution.
Conclusion
I believe that current debate on the future of London’s airport capacity has mistakenly drawn links between it and other European cities such as Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Instead, New York should provide us with a working example of how a city can have three major airports serving different routes and complementing each other, without the need for a single ‘hub’ airport. Indeed, in terms of size of the city and its position geographically at the edge of a continent, London is far more akin to New York than it is to Amsterdam or Frankfurt.
For both safety and environmental reasons an additional runway at Heathrow would lower living standards for my constituents and disturb hundreds of thousands of Londoners.
Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted all have a place to play in maintaining or expanding Britain’s global connections and securing trade for British industry. A distributed hub would provide the extra capacity airlines need, the routes businesses desire; without afflicting west London residents with additional noise.
I therefore strongly urge the Commission to reject further expansion of Heathrow Airport.