Continuation from: Heathrow in the Dragon’s Den | Neighbours

The recent deregulation of flights to the USA has shown very clearly that passengers vote with their feet, and choose Heathrow over Gatwick every time. Why else would Continental Airlines shell out £100m for two slot pairs at Heathrow in order to operate flights to New York, when they already have access at Gatwick? Despite the current economic woes, Heathrow has remained resilient as passenger numbers at almost all other UK airports have plummeted.

Do passengers like the Heathrow (or is that Hellthrow?) experience? Well, according to BAA’s own surveys, the user experience is slowly improving. Within two years, over half of Heathrow passengers will be using facilities that are less than 4 years old. Heathrow is already ‘moving up the table’ in terms of passenger surveys, and management claim they are hot on the heels of Amsterdam.

So would a third runway enable freer flowing traffic, or would it just snarl things up even more? Management claim that the new runway would preserve important feeder routes, and stop the airport ‘robbing destinations to pay for frequency’. Since 1990, Heathrow has gone from serving over 220 destinations to around just 180 today. This argument over hubbing is very persuasive. Most other arguments are essentially linear – i.e. more flights means more pollution and more contribution to the economy. The power of a hub increases dramatically due to the fact that doubling the number of routes means four times as many opportunities for connections.

Consider:

1 route = o connections.

2 routes = 1 connection pair (A to B via LHR).

3 routes = 3 pairs (A to B, A to C, B to C)

10 routes = 45 pairs – and so on.

This presents a very compelling argument on behalf of passengers. The key question to ask is what effect extra airfield capacity would have on the terminals. It is only natural to assume that BAA would want to build a sixth terminal in order to recoup their investment. Details of this are patchy at present – but anything which needs new terminal space to move outside the area in between the existing two runways is going to get very messy, considering how current rail infrastructure has to split to serve the central area (T1,2,3), T4 and T5.

Defending such claims, Heathrow’s Runway 3 Director argued that new capacity would make it easier to group flights according to airline alliances. Terminal 5 was already putting most BA flights under one roof, whereas Star Alliance would be hosted in the central area. This still doesn’t help passengers much who are connecting between different airline networks, or who might be using Sky Team airlines, who don’t offer feeder flights from within the UK and Ireland. However, these are in the minority, compared to BA or Star passengers.

Verdict – the most likely to say ‘we’re in’