Continuation from Heathrow’s Runway in Dragon’s Den | Neighbours | Passengers | Economy
I’m not going to look at the local environmental issues - these are covered under ‘Neighbours’. This section is about the contribution of Heathrow and the aviation industry in general to climate change.
So, the arguments against are well known and well practiced - aviation currently represents around 5% of the UK’s contribution to greenhouse gas emmissions, and this figure is set to keep rising as other industries clean up their act. There is a suggestion that if current trends continue, all other sectors would have to reduce their emmissions by 90%, rather than the previously suggested 80%, just to allow people to keep flying. The most efficient form of flying in terms of fuel usage per passenger kilometre travelled is to use no-frills airlines, as they offer the following environmental advantages:
- Point to point service meaning no wasteful connections.
- Younger business model almost certainly means newer fleet - especially in the case of Flybe, Easyjet and Ryanair.
- No frills airlines tend to operate routes with higher load factors, and are quicker to withdraw unprofitable routes.
- No frills airlines use less congested airports, cutting down on ground taxiing and pre-landing stacking.
- No frills airlines tend to ruthlessly cut costs - and lower costs usually go hand in hand with better environmental performance.
So how can Heathrow’s third runway possibly be justified in the face of such serious environmental concerns, and the lower environmental performance of traditional ‘legacy’ carriers?
Time to play devil’s advocate:
A new runway would reduce airfield congestion and stacking
More capacity means less congestion - this is a fair point, except that more capacity also means more flights to take up that capacity. And in Heathrow’s case, this would almost certainly mean going from being 99% full on two runways to 99% full on three runways. Result - some efficiency improvements might be created, but these would be counterbalanced by the increase in flights.
We still need hub and spoke networks
However much better the no-frills airlines might seem on paper, there will always be a need for some hub and spoke routes, and only Heathrow can serve these - not Gatwick or Stansted, even though those airports might have smaller noise footprints.
If Heathrow doesn’t expand, somewhere else will - and the UK loses out without any CO2 reduction
This is true to a point, but the passengers would still need to get to the other hub airports. Taking up slots with feeders into Frankfurt or Amsterdam will use up more runway space per passenger than operating direct flights to the destinations people want to go to (assuming long haul flights use larger aircraft), so whatever BAA claim, Heathrow will always cherry pick the most important and profitable destinations, rather than serve every route it can.
Expanding Heathrow means more direct flights, so less need for connections
With regards to flights into European hubs from other UK regional airports, passengers from cities such as Birmingham or Bristol are already more likely to transfer through Amsterdam or Paris, as they have feeder routes from most parts of the UK, whereas such a short route into Heathrow would not be viable. This is obviously more wasteful than a direct flight from Heathrow, so adding more capacity and building a high speed rail link into Heathrow would partially alleviate this problem.
Verdict: The environmental dragons would always be expected to shoot down any proposal for expansion at any airport. Although there are clearly some environmental benefits, these are often outweighed by other factors. For example, for every seat which an expanded Heathrow would enable to be filled on a point to point bases, how many other seats would just be filled by transfer passengers who might have gone elsewhere? Even if a clear distinction is made between the need to minimize the contribution made to climate change by aviation as a whole and the effects of one single airport, there is still an obvious correlation between more capacity and more flights. However much BAA try to massage the arguments, the concept of ’sustainable aviation growth’ is always going to be an oxymoron.
