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.

Guess I picked the wrong week to give up drinking

Taking a plane was, once, an exercise in projected sophistication, where even the most proletariat of us felt like Cary Grant at the mere possession of a boarding pass. But that all changed when everyone decided to get in on it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: travel brings out the worst in everyone, rendering modern air travel considerably less of the glamfest it once was. Once you've survived the public humiliation of walking barefoot through a full body scanner, your beltless trousers displaying that you're too cheap to actually buy Calvin Klein underwear, you must then witness the utter desperation of "speedy boarding" as families leg it for the departure gate...despite being transferred to the plane by bus. This is then followed by gittish overhead locker space hogging (avoiding selling a kidney just to put a bag in the hold) before taking a seat in a row so tight even regularly-sized people need a boarding pass for each buttock. And all that before being charged the equivalent of Uruguay's national debt for a half tub of Pringles while suffering spine-shattering mid-air turbulence caused by global warming, which has itself been contributed to by all this flying.

Air travel is hell, so it's no surprise that people turn up for flights not-so elegantly wasted or break open their duty-free tequila as soon as the seatbelt signs are turned off. However, as bossy teachers (if I can use that brand) used to say, "there's always one who spoils it for the others". Actually, it's more than one - hen parties and rugby club tours, mostly, who seem unable to fly an hour or so on CheapyJet to Tallinn or Puerto Banus without first consuming a weekend's worth of grog before they've even left the airport bar. Which is not what airport bars are for.

Pre-flight drinking used to be part of the glamour. An exotic cocktail in the company of interesting, erudite international travellers, or a couple of strong ones to calm the nerves of the nervous flyer, or a romantic glass of champagne to get the honeymoon off to a gooey-eyed start. But, no. Despite airports being partially designed to encourage drinking via concourse bars and duty-free shops, the trouble is that too many people are availing themselves too much.

In February, a six-man stag party flying to Bratislava from Luton was arrested after brawling onboard the plane, leading to it being diverted to Berlin. A month later a group of 24 Irish men were thrown off a flight to Costa Rica after allegedly becoming "drunk and abusive" as it waited for takeoff at Gatwick Airport. In May a woman found to be "unresponsive" and slumped in her seat was ordered off an easyJet plane to Paphos before it had even left Manchester Airport...punching the pilot in the process, forcing the airline to replace him, delaying the flight further. And it's not just those 'turning right' at the aircraft door causing trouble: last December, Finnish dress designer Leena Romu attacked a flight attendant as she was boarding a Virgin plane to Dubai, "noticeably unsteady on her feet" and clutching bottles (plural) of duty-free. She was flying First Class.

By and large these are isolated incidents, but the increasing regularity with which they are being reported appears to be enough for Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Aviation, to decide to look into doing something about it. "If you’re a young family travelling on a plane you want to go from point A to B, you don’t want to be disrupted," Ahmad said last week (and good that the UK's aviation minister gets the concept of travelling from one place to another...). He does, though, have a point. "I don’t think we want to kill merriment altogether," he added, "but I think it’s important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind."

In 30-plus years of frequent flying I've been rarely troubled by boozy passengers: there was my first ever long-haul flight, to Los Angeles, when I stupidly picked seat 52A of a Virgin Atlantic 747. Not only was I in the smoking section (remember those? Not fun on a 13-hour flight...), but I was sat next to a chain-smoking, G&T-guzzling bit-part actor heading home. He had a grand sounding name (and is still active - I've checked), who told me he'd been in the soap All My Children and episodes of Murder She Wrote. There very nearly was a murder in seat 52B as "Claude" continuously ordered more to drink as he rattled on about Angela Landsbury and Cabot Cove until, thankfully, passing out somewhere over Canada. That, and a pair of American technology salesmen (identified by their tan chinos, golf shirts and loud voices) sat in front of me on a recent British Airways flight from London to Paris, and managed to get loaded on tiny bottles of wine in just the 45 minutes we were in the air, is about it. Perhaps I've been lucky or, perhaps, these incidents have been blown out of proportion by the press. But police statistics obtained under a freedom of information request have shown that over the last two years more than 400 people have been arrested on suspicion of being drunk on flights in the UK.

Out of 250 million passengers handled by British airports each year, that may not sound a lot, but if one of those 400 disrupted your holiday, you'd be justifiably annoyed. And it's something the airlines themselves say needs to be tackled. It is certainly enough of a nuisance problem for the British Government to consider action. A first step would be identifying whether or not the current rules do enough to prevent a bit of fun turning into something more serious. Currently, bars at British airports are allowed to be open according to the earliest and latest flights of the day, a common practice at most airports around the world, and in the case of London's Gatwick, for example, means the taps are open as early as 4am for those departing on holiday flights.

Furthermore, airport bars are not subjected to the same licensing restrictions as pubs, bars and restaurants on the outside, and can, in theory, be open 24 hours a day. This, says Lord Ahmad, is something that "needs to be looked at". Last week the new UK Aviation Industry Code of Practice on Disruptive Passengers was published and included guidance to cabin crew that duty-free booze shouldn't be opened in-flight, and that terminal bars should stop selling alcohol to passengers showing signs of drunkeness (which, I thought, was already the case, along with check-in desk personnel being trained to spot - and smell - drunken behaviour). New rules will mean that any alcohol bought in duty-free shops should be stored on flights away from passengers or in bags that should remain sealed for the duration of the flight. At present, it would appear, nothing prevents sealed duty-free shopping from being opened once onboard.

"I don't think we want to kill merriment altogether," Ahmad said last week, adding that passengers do "have a responsibility to other passengers". Quite how far the government will go, however is - if you can excuse the pun - up in the air. Simon Calder, travel editor of The Independent, says that any action is unlikely to lead to an outright drinking ban at airports or on planes. "It won't happen with a straightforward booze ban", he told ITV's Good Morning Britain. "There'll be various techniques [the government] will be looking at, such as opening hours and restricting the number of drinks you can have. You may have to have your boarding card scanned or marked so you only have a couple of drinks." Breathalyzing passengers at risk of being drunk might be another possibility, Calder said, and it might be done "on a flight-by-flight basis", given that the same 'party' destinations crop up in the charge sheet of reported incidents.

"With air travel proving more popular than ever, and passenger numbers expected to rise across the whole of the UK in the coming years, now is the time to tackle this problem collectively," said Tim Alderslade, Chief Executive of the British Air Transport Association and Ed Anderson, Chairman of the Airport Operators Association, in a joint statement.

You can't knock their initiative, of course, or indeed the desire of airlines to tackle the problem. But equally you can't help feeling that it is a problem that, while the industry hasn't exactly created it, has certainly benefited from financially in both making air travel more available, and getting people to pay hansomely at airport bars for a few pints too many at Stupid O'Clock in the morning. Perhaps it is time to reign this in.