Ah sorry I was wrong. Thanks for the links!
Heathrow third runway: public bill up to £10bn hidden, says Tory MP
Former transport minister Stephen Hammond urges government to ‘come clean’ over probable bill to taxpayerswww.theguardian.com
I understand why airlines dump their excess capacity on connecting travellers. It eats up surplus capacity whilst making sure the fares for O&D stay high. It makes pure commercial sense. All the airlines do it- ex-UK long haul fares on KLM are cheaper than those from Schiphol.
Of course the issue is that the people who will have their homes bulldozed weren’t near the airport when they bought their homes. And the people under the approach routes to Heathrow weren’t under the approaches when they bought their homes.
It’s about the same time on the train from St Pancras to Gatwick as it is from St Pancras to Heathrow.
You are advocating artificially restricting the potential of LHR by telling airlines they must only operate point-to-point traffic purely for O&D. So you’re saying cut the routes that are only viable with connecting passengers.
This is of course true. You would effectively decrease, or at best not increase, connectivity from LHR and thus not add value from it, which would not aid the growth agenda.
The best option is do nothing at Heathrow. Why does anything have to be done?
They aren’t upgrading the M25, just sticking it in a tunnel (causing massive disruption in the process)
So airlines at airports such as Heathrow should only serve markets that are viable direct - no connections? All you do is drive traffic that needs to go to airports not served by Heathrow to Amsterdam / Paris / Frankfurt / Dubai. Same number of passengers overall - it’s just that most of their money goes elsewhere rather than to UK airlines / airports. Aviation is a global business / competition and its survival of the fittest - we can’t be nationalistically blinkered.
No, I’m saying they can’t whine about insufficient capacity if they’re still dumping huge amounts of excess capacity on cheapo connecting fares.
I’ll bet you one shiny pound that there isn’t a single route from Heathrow whose existence is dependant on cheapo ex-EU fares. And where that couldn’t be solved by BA competing with AF/KLM on price for *UK customers*
Foreigners connecting through Heathrow on cheapo fares don’t contribute to any growth whatsoever. Even with WH Smith’s rampant price gouging connecting passengers buying a tube of Pringles and a bottle of Coke Zero aren’t going to bring us economic boom times.
My point was about connectivity, i.e. the number of different destinations directly available from London to make it easier to connect to business opportunities and also import / export through the freight carried in the hold. The more routes the better.
As I said, I’ll bet one shiny pound that there isn’t a single route from Heathrow that is wholly or partly dependent on cheapo connecting passenger fares to make it break even.
Spot on. Airport expansion is just a slightly shinier version of thinking that we can grow the economy by selling each other more cups of coffee and pieces of cake.
You are wrong. Most of them are hence the need to offer hub and spoke networks. If it wasn’t the case BA and others would scrap their low earning low capacity routes and sell the slots to other airlines to fly bigger aircraft on more point to point routes, the fact that they aren’t doing this proves the point.
It isn’t viable anyway, it’s underwritten by the Manx government.
Lots of people who work in London are resident in the Isle of Man for a few key reasons.
Well, the UK government would barely be involved. Heathrow Express is owned by Heathrow Airport Holdings (so up to them how much of a cut was given to HeX) and E* already offer air and rail combined tickets for people travelling to/from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, so I don't see why they'd refuse such an arrangement here. A private bus-based shuttle could be contracted out easily to an operator in the London area.
The rail industry's "solution" is Old Oak Common, and it seems like that's the best they're going to get.
A bit more than rumoured, they have placed orders with Airbus and Boeing for aircraft.
Would Manchester-Heathrow make a profit without connecting passengers? Remember that the FlyBe's second attempt failed due to woefully low usage on many of their shuttle routes, as they had no connecting routes out of Heathrow. What killed of FlyBe in 2022, wasn't lack of aircraft as they claimed it was, it was competition from the railway on routes like London-Leeds/Bradford.
I live in the North and since 2021, have taken all of my flights from London, as Manchester didn't serve my destination. I'm sure Manchester and Birmingham having more short haul and also long haul routes (Emirates have multiple daily services from both to Dubai) could help London Airport, I for one, would switch back to flying from the North, as I'm sure many others would, if this was the case. Other alternatives include limiting short haul flights, such as to Manchester and closer European destinations and of course building HS2 in full to make these short flights irrelevant (except for connections) and boost more Eurostar services.
You could potentially push some of the smaller European airlines out here, if facilities were improved, but I don't see any long haul carriers settling for Stansted.
Emirates serves Stansted with two daily flights to Dubai.
If it’s good enough for Emirates…
It does, but most other long haul carriers don't have the demand or capacity to serve both a more major London airport and Stansted, and nearly all will not willingly totally shift operations to just Stansted.
Emirates fly to a lot of interesting places, so I don't think that's a sign of anything in particular.
Any other country wouldn’t give them the choice. “You want more slots, you go to Stansted”. It’s what the Chinese did in Beijing. “Move to Daxing or get nothing”.
Yes, that's why I said push some of the smaller European operators out to Stansted, instead of the long haul ones, and improve facilities like security/lounges/check in.
I agree for short-haul operators at least.
With the exception of Emirates, Stansted is a low cost fortress and history has shown us that Long Haul Low Cost isn't usually successful.
I imagine that Emirates would much rather serve Heathrow or Gatwick than Stansted, but they serve both with A380s and to boost capacity to London, Stansted was their only option.
Indeed. My point was that most long haul carriers don't have enough demand to serve multiple London airports, and they aren't going to for Stansted unless they are forced to.
New players into the London Market are already being forced into Gatwick, so soon Stansted will be that overflow. Want to serve London? Stansted might soon be your best option unless you're willing to pay a *lot* for slots from another airline.