Still waiting to land

© Simon Poulter 2016

When you've been squashed into an economy class seat for several hours, the very last thing you need is for the captain to announce that you'll be remaining in that state longer than intended because the airport you're expecting to arrive at can't fit your plane in.

For London's creaking Heathrow Airport, such an announcement will usually be a precursor to your plane circling around one of the airport's holding points for what seems like an age. Having grown up in south-west London, there's only so much I can take of watching the area repeatedly pass underneath the wing while the pilot negotiates a landing slot with air traffic control, mindful of a rapidly dwindling fuel supply.

Going in the other direction is not much better, either. Such is Heathrow's limitations that it can often take up to half an hour of crawling along a taxiway before your plane is finally in the air. For some short trips, like those I've regularly made over the last 17 years between London and Paris or Amsterdam, it often feels like you spend longer taxiing than actually flying.

But now, with the political debate about Heathrow's expansion hotting up again, it's depressing to think that whatever the solution - a third runway at Heathrow, a second at Gatwick or both - south-east England's chronic runway shortage won't be resolved any time soon. 2030, is the earliest we can expect an improvement, and that's a liberal estimate, allowing for further legal and political challenges and then actual construction of a runway or runways.

The irony of this for me, in my frequent journeys in and out of Paris and Amsterdam, is that arriving at either city is never frustrated by delays. Charles De Gaulle regularly operates four runways at once - two for take-offs, two for landings - while Schiphol has up to seven runways at its disposal. And with both airports benefitting from good transport links, it's no wonder that foreign business travellers consider both these cities more accessible than London. Post-Brexit, with companies - including London's financial community - considering alternative locations, both Paris and Amsterdam become very attractive propositions. Frankfurt, too, with its vast airport.

Heathrow is an anachronism, after all. Originally opened as just a small airfield in 1929, by the end of the Second World War it had grown into a major hub for long-distance military transportation. However, it was never designed for the volume of traffic it handles today (it is the world's sixth busiest by passenger traffic) and is now operating at 99% capacity. And that's not even taking into account the environmental and obvious safety hazards it presents London, with the majority of landings happening in the westerly direction, requiring inbound traffic to fly across London from east to west.

The question, then, is why build another runway at Heathrow at all? Why not just add a second at Gatwick, or another at Stanstead, or better still, go through with Boris Johnson's plan, when mayor of London, to build a brand new airport in the Thames Estuary. This idea would have addressed the capacity issue in one fell swoop, plus it could have been achieved relatively more quickly, and would even deliver better connectivity to, not just London, the national transportation infrastructure altogether.

However, that ship - to mix metaphors - has sadly sailed. But we're still no nearer to resolving the fundamental issue about easing south-east England's airport capacity. For those of us who fly regularly, especially for their work, we are being committed to a never-ending cycle of political arguments and fudges, followed by legal challenges before there is any outcome. Which begs the question - if 2030 is the earliest before any new runway or airport capacity could be available, what will air travel be like by then? It's safe to assume that Star Trek-style teleportation won't quite yet be available, but it's also safe to assume that the current exponential growth in commercial aviation won't have arrested itself by then.

Not that any of this is a new topic. Discussions about Heathrow expansion go back to the Harold Wilson government of the late 1960s, and have periodically cropped up in the decades since. David Cameron made a pledge in 2009 that no new runway at Heathrow would be built. However, following last year's backing of a third runway at Heathrow by Sir Howard Davies' Airport Commission, Cameron promised a new decision by the end of last year. Still, though, nothing. And now it's the turn of Theresa May's government to make a decision...which it has now pushed out to sometime next week. Possibly. Maybe.

With high-profile Tories like Zac Goldsmith, whose Richmond Park constituency sits underneath Heathrow's final approach, threatening to quit the party over airport expansion, cabinet minister and Putney MP, Justine Greening also opposed along with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson maintaining his mayoral stance, for now, the matter threatens to become evern messier, politicially, than at any time in its long history. Prime Minister Theresa May has told her cabinet that once the airports sub-committee - which she chairs - has made a decision, there would be a full public consultation on it...which would take the matter to a final vote by MPs at the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018.

London's class new mayor, Sadiq Khan - who has been doing a sterling job in promoting London's availability to do business post-Brexit - is understandably angry about the continuing logjam. "Now, more than ever, businesses need certainty and stability in order to make investment decisions," Khan said yesterday on the Heathrow decision. "Instead they are getting dither and delay." Khan favours building a new runway at Gatwick Airport, "which can be built quicker, cheaper, and without the years of legal and political battles that Heathrow clearly faces".

A good point, but sadly, for those of us stuck in economy, either circling over the Home Counties or looking out a window at Hounslow at ground level, it's going to be a long, long time before any relief is in sight.