Heathrow third runway: Passenger experience will likely get worse before it gets better

The UK's busiest airports can barely cope and that third runway isn't happening any time soon, says Simon Calder

Aircraft at Heathrow Airport, with the London skyline in the background (Getty)

Between 1 July last year and 25 October this year, 482 days elapsed. That’s almost 16 months of aircraft flying around in circles over the Home Counties while waiting to land at Heathrow and Gatwick, or (if you’re waiting to depart) 1.32 years of planes queuing up to take off.

Those are the two key dates in airport expansion in South East England. The first was when Sir Howard Davies’ Airport Commission unanimously backed a third runway at Heathrow; the second is when Theresa May’s Government not-quite-unanimously gave the £17bn project the go-ahead — subject to a year of public consultation, a parliamentary vote and assorted legal challenges.

At the heart of the issue is the extent to which local residents should have to suffer extra noise and pollution for a project designed to increase Britain's global reach.

Let’s take the most optimistic view (from the passenger’s perspective, at least): by 2025, the third runway will be open, possibly accessed by an unusual ramp that will avoid the need to put the M25 in a tunnel. Between now and then, I can’t see that life for business and leisure passengers alike using the world’s busiest runways (two at Heathrow, one at Gatwick) is going to do anything except deteriorate.

Last Sunday I flew from Miami to Heathrow. BA206 left 20 minutes behind schedule, landed half an hour late after circling over Surrey for 10 minutes, and was then despatched to a distant corner of the airport where, apparently, no one was expecting the 747.

Ten minutes after we stopped, the first officer announced: “There’s a member of British Airways staff running around and waving frantically.” Eventually some steps arrived, but the last passengers were finally bussed to Terminal 3 at 8am — 80 minutes after the scheduled arrival time.

Since the minimum connecting time to Terminal 5, where most BA flights depart, is 90 minutes, staff were having to do some heavy-duty re-booking. The Tel Aviv departure, due out 95 minutes after BA206’s official arrival time, was held, complete with a special bus to whisk passengers across the airfield, but many other flights departed without their booked quota of passengers.

Other hub airports, and their dominant airlines, experience similar problems; compared with many, Heathrow and British Airways are models of efficiency. But that’s because they have to be, because there is so little resilience in the system.

Tuesday 25 October 2016 may yet be seen as a defining moment in modernising the UK’s airport portfolio. For decades, the question of adding new aviation capacity in South East England has been a master-class in prevarication. Successive Transport Secretaries have assured me "Doing nothing is not an option," and then proceeded to do exactly that.

Airport expansion is the hottest of political potatoes, as media coverage of the announcement showed. On the day of the decision, addicts of 24-hour television news enjoyed a feast of airport outside-broadcasts. Satellite trucks were parked at the two rivals for a new runway, Heathrow and Gatwick, as well as Manchester, Edinburgh and other UK airports. For hour after hour, airport and airline bosses debated the benefits and repercussions of giving Heathrow the go-ahead to build a third runway.

But talking about the new infrastructure is far easier than building it. There are many challenges ahead: political, financial and logistical.

About the only certainty: while the argument rages, the UK's busiest airports will continue to extract remarkable productivity from assets that are accidents of history rather than carefully planned infrastructure. And travellers will continue to grumble when it all unravels.