It starts most days about five in the morning, as planes begin their final approach to Heathrow. Almost immediately, a queue forms. “Red eye” flights arrive from North America that have taken off just before the continent’s airports closed for the night, together with flights from the Middle East that are avoiding hot and heavy expensive fuel burning take offs by taking advantage of lower overnight temperatures. Flights from India, the Far East, Australasia and South Africa add to the number of “Heavies” queuing to Land at Heathrow, as can be seen here in this picture by Dutch Flickrist Nusty R Airteam Images to whom we offer our thanks and copyright acknowledgements. Further pictures for his photo-stream can be seen here.
Hanging in the Air Like Bricks Don’t
With landing gear down and landing lights and anti-collision lights on, they circle in the air over Battersea, Putney and Acton. In the words of Douglas Adams’ wonderful oxymoron, “Hanging in the air, like bricks don’t”. Flights from European time zones, with populations and public transport systems that rise before the United Kingdom, begin to add to the morning surge, inserting more, smaller aircraft to the mix. Finally, examples of a congestion endangered species – flights from British regional airports – appear. On top of all this, for every landing at Heathrow there is a corresponding take off later in the day.
A complex dynamic picture rapidly builds up, hinging on expert coordination from air traffic control. The Local Controller is responsible for providing separation between arriving and departing aircraft. This involves the safe sequencing of arrivals and departures by relaying Instrument Flight Rule (IFR) clearances together with taxi instructions, take-off and landing clearances and finally the provision of assistance to other flights just flying through the local area. There are clear identified guidelines for keeping aircraft at a safe separation distance from each other. IFR flights use a standard instrument approach when arriving at an airport, whilst pilots following Visual Flight Rules (VFR) follow a standard traffic pattern. The separation regulations for arriving aircraft are similar to the departure regulations with added complications. Arriving aircraft have different speeds with higher speed aircraft overtaking other slower aircraft. Some aircraft have stall speeds higher than many other aircraft top speeds. The controllers must sequence and space all arriving aircraft in a dynamic system.
A further complication is added by all aircraft producing wingtip vortices caused by the generation of lift from the wings. The vortices generated by “Heavy aircraft” (aircraft weighing 255,000 pounds or more) and Boeing 757 aircraft generate vortices with a strength equivalent to a small tornado. This turbulence can endanger another aircraft if it is following too close behind. As a result, there has to be a greater separation in distance and time when a “heavy” is in the traffic mix. Wingtip vortices can cause problems no matter the size of any of the aircraft if safe separation is not maintained. But that is not all that can go awry because, as Donald Rumsfeld, (when not trying to explain the Johari Window, a simple two by two matrix box in words that defied the graphic simplicity of the underlying concept), also once said “Stuff happens – and it’s untidy”. In the case of airports, untidiness is the weather, technical problems, security alerts and the odd, pub-quiz-tiebreak-winning-answer, Icelandic Volcano, that causes, “the best-laid plans o’ flights and men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!” [Good Job we have no Scottish readers – JB]
In every complex system that relies on sequential integration a further difficulty arises as the system starts to reach capacity. Congestion arises when there is a need to modify behaviour because of the presence of others in the system. All transport systems display a phase transition from flowing freely to a recurring hiccough that pulses through those following behind. This need to modify behaviour to match that of the least capable member is a race to the bottom in transport efficiency that we experience on daily basis on motorways, as evidenced by blaze of multiple brake lights followed by phantom jams caused for no apparent reason.
For engineers, TRIZ, the Inventive Problem Solution theory, suggests congestion is a simple physical contradiction of time and space. For economists, forcing the consequences of your decisions on to others is called “enforced externalities” and is part of their “Tragedy of the Commons” theory. In its simplest terms, it can be described like this:
| Same Time | Different Time | |
|---|---|---|
| Same Space | Only one event can take place | Two events can take place |
| Different Space | Two events can take place | Many events can take place |
In terms of trains, on a single line there can only be one train at any one time, on dual tracks two trains, and quadruple track four trains. The corollary is that at different times there can be more than one train on one track on single track, more than two trains on a double track and more than four, etc. For trains, substitute aircraft and for tracks substitute flight paths, taxi and holding points and loading gates.
So it all comes down to finding more space and more time. And for this, there are thus three choices – finding more space at the same time, finding more time using the same space, or a combination of both. The choices then continue:- whether to expand through a sustaining investment at an existing airport or a “disruptive” investment at a new airport.
“Disruptive” will be read differently, depending on where you stand – economists will use it synonymously with the term “game changing” whilst others, ranging from those who see such developments as a threat to the environment in general to those whose personal life style and life equity investments will be impaired, will read the term “disruptive” as “damaging or life changing”.
“Real Politik” greet “Vorsprung durch Technik”! – Why joined-up systems need joined-up thinking
“A commander in chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his minister or his sovereign, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan that he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army’s downfall.”
“Military Maxims and Thoughts”, Napoleon Bonaparte as annotated by Robert C. Townsend in his 1974 book “Up the Organisation”
Runway operation is the fundamental system underlying all modern airports but in itself it is part of a hierarchy of mutually dependent iterative systems that are needed to keep the process going.
Passenger processing, aircraft sustainment (fuel, maintenance etc.), surface access/egress and security are all blended. This integration has been refined over the years so that systems have become more and more closely coupled. It is now difficult to separate the strands as evidenced by the recent spat between the Home Secretary and Brodie Clark, the senior manager at the Border Agency over the suspension (or unauthorised degradation) of entry formalities during terms of peak loading at the airport.
Much was made of the need for passengers to wait to pass immigration checks, however, the killing factor as far as the Airport and the Airlines were concerned was the fact that the entire system can only operate on the assumption that passengers will clear immigration in a reasonable period of time – ideally the same amount of time it takes to get their baggage off the plane and on to the baggage hall conveyers. If this does not happen and passengers are thus not standing ready to grab their bags in the hall, then the bags from later flights cannot be unloaded and the trolley system that ferries bags from flights cannot function in its corollary role in loading out-bound baggage.
Rapidly, a whole series of knock on effects takes place. Check-in times become protracted, resulting in the appearance of temporary marquees at Heathrow with the scant consolation of complementary water and crisps for passengers. Aircraft have to be kept on stands longer than expected, denying that ground space to incoming flights. Close-coupled airports function at the processing speed of their slowest system and as they approach capacity in any of those systems the potential for congestion to degrade that system and the overall super system increases. Synergy, the emergent properties that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts, flicks as part of the phase transition from being a positive to be a negative effect.
The political bush fire that raged over this issue is in danger of confusing the smoke for the trees. One of the problems every Home Secretary faces is that nobody remembers when things go right, but everybody remembers when things go wrong.
Shelagh Mackinley, writing in the Guardian, highlights another problem arising from Government choices to operate through agencies that have wrought subtle and possibly unforeseen and unappreciated changes to traditional command and control structures.
The Home Secretary was rightly concerned about national security and this conditioned her perspective, but that is not the only perspective that needs to be considered and her colleagues in the Department of Transport should not be backward in coming forward in pointing out the knock-on implications of her position regarding the operation of the UKBA. They must reiterate the need for a holistic approach based on a sound understanding of systems engineering. It is also a question of tackling causes not treating symptoms. This is all about being tough on congestion and tough on the causes of congestion.
In part two we shall move on to an examination of the range of solutions available for London when it comes to addressing the Airport capacity problem, and just how tough they might be.
London Airports & their customers affect transport in & around the area – a lot.
We know the Davies/Airports commission have “chosen” Heathrow, but:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34495393
All principal Mayoral candidates standing against LHR’s expansion.
( Presumably they want Gatwick, except the “greens” who want us to cycle (snark))
Question can the guvmint actually force a Heatrow expansion through, against this, or will they plump for Gatwick?
[ And, should this be the topic for a new thread, later? ]
Greg
Risking the moderators’ ire to answer a point you have made….probably not,given the Gummint’s wafer-thin majority and the political complexion of the constituencies most affected by Heathrow blight,plus the upcoming Euro-referendum fight…I suspect another punt in the medium-to-long grass….
Despite the heavy bias in the report towards Heathrow , Osborne has been making noises about it all being finely balanced to either one. Plus BA have said they don’t want to pay for a bloated Heathrow Scheme. so I suspect Gatwick may come up top.
It’s the cheapest and requires the least government money, plus it only has a few thousand people affected by increased noise and pollution, compared to Heathrow on the other hand…
The issue will be, whatever decision the government reaches, can it get beyond the point of no return before the next general election? This is critical for Heathrow expansion because there are four or five seats in west London that could change hands from a pro-heathrow Government to an anti-Heathrow opposition. After all, this is precisely what happened in 2010 (when the Conservative leader, one David Cameron, said ‘no ifs, no buts’ there would be no third runway at Heathrow).
This is less critical for Gatwick expansion where none of the seats affected are really marginal except for Crawley, and that is more likely to vote for expansion (because of more jobs) than against.
Have been pondering – is this really a Heathrow vs Gatwick issue or rather a Gatwick and possibly Heathrow issue as the existing 1979 voluntary agreement not to build a 2nd runway at Gatwick ends in 2019, presumably Gatwick will apply to build a second one anyway whatever the outcome as it got shortlisted?
The take off and landing charges at Heathrow will have to be considerably larger if the 3rd runway goes ahead to pay for it as BA have been warning.
On 18 June 2014, the Mayor of London held an event at Stratford Old Town Hall entitled “Shaping a growing London”.
Professor Tony Travers of the LSE wasn’t best pleased when I asked a question about landlord crime and licensing private tenancies, since, despite the title, the event was actually all about airports.
Howard Davies explained that his Commission had gone through all options in great detail. Their conclusion was that the choice for the next runway in SE England was between Heathrow and Gatwick. Stansted and an artificial island in the Thames estuary were not only too much travelling time form central London, but the wrong side of London to be much value to the rest of the country.
Alan Griffiths:
You seem to report a statement that Gatwick isn’t “the wrong side of London” for “the rest of the country”. Er…?
CL
Gatwick can be reached direct, from as far N as Bedford.
The tame Slink is a faster service than the mis-named “Stansted Express” & post-2019 will be accessible from CR1 as well.
[timings to Kent towns deletion for serial repetition. PoP]
Caspar Lucas
13 October 2015 at 07:27
“You seem to report a statement that Gatwick isn’t “the wrong side of London” for “the rest of the country”. Er…?”
I don’t recall that point being covered. But Gatwick has even better rail access than Greg Tingey reports, notably by one change at Kings Cross St Pancras. “Crossrail is coming” which will greatly improve access involving only two changes.
@Greg
not to mention connections at Reading to large areas of the rest of the country.
@quinlet
“four or five seats in west London that could change hands from a pro-Heathrow Government to an anti-Heathrow opposition”
Certainly three, (but remember that the Tories lost as many seats as they gained in west London)
http://www.cityam.com/215415/general-election-2015-results-map-how-many-seats-did-conservatives-and-labour-win-london-and
Remember that losing those five seats would wipe out the government’s majority. And we may well get a byelection in the near future in SW London since both the Labour and Conservative candidates for mayor are sitting MPs (for Tooting and for Richmond Park)
(For those who would point out that currently their majority is ten seats, remember that the number of seats is fixed – if you lose a seat someone else must win it: so we go from 330/320 to 325/325 – and yes I do know that the practical majority is bigger because the Speaker doesn’t vote, and neither do Sinn Fein)
Hmm. That Reading-Gatwick train may be direct but the journey time isn’t that great, particularly if you are assuming that to get to Reading you have travelled from somewhere north on the CrossCountry route, which is slower than equivalent main lines fanning out from London.
Statement of interest: I live and work in the West Midlands, although I could equally refer to Greater Manchester or Merseyside. Connections to Gatwick via King’s Cross/St Pancras are not ideal. And, of course, by definition they involve “rest of country” to “wrong side of London” airport passengers clogging up capacity in central London which would be best used for local journeys, or longer distance journeys which do actually start or end in central London.
I suppose what really interests me is the potential for “putting places on the map” by being rail-connected with (relatively) simple connections – the same effect as with the London Overground but writ larger. And I am actually rather more exercised by links from major airports to the regions rather than the other way round. Let me postulate that international investment follows the clearer and easier transport routes. On that basis, much of the country is unattractive to investment represented by international travellers arriving at Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted.
Crossrail+HS2 from Heathrow as proposed would be a significant improvement, but if the choice for aviation growth is Gatwick then the “rest of the country” would seem to lose out, relatively speaking.
@Caspar Lucas
“West Midlands, although I could equally refer to Greater Manchester or Merseyside. Connections to Gatwick via King’s Cross/St Pancras are not ideal. ”
Nothing’s perfect of course, but both Manchester and Birmingham have airports too, which are accessible not only from the local areas but are also from much of NW London, West Herts and north Bucks, more easily than either Heathrow or Gatwick can ever be. Manchester Airport in particular has direct links to a huge area of northern Britain
Thameslink 2000-and-counting will improve services from Kings Cross to Gatwick, although of course from Euston this will still require a further change. (A situation which could be improved, for Birmingham passengers at least, if Chiltern were to call at West Hampstead)
@Caspar Lucas – having worked (three times!) for UK companies that have been taken over by foreign investors, I have to tell you that the availability of international connexions had SFA to do with the rationale for investing -indeed, having bought/wasted many millions in the takeover, in every case, the Americans were quite happy to hunker down in the fuehrerbunker in Podunk Illinois; we had no idea what what they looked like. There is a persistent myth that investment follows ease of access – this is a myth peddled by airports. There is absolutely zero supporting factual evidence to support it.
GF – thank you for the reply. One interpretation would be that there is no economic benefit from providing access to airports (presumably once a certain threshold has been passed). So I suppose the next question is: which British airports (if any) should have any further transport links provided to them, however funded? Naturally I include Crossrail’s Heathrow connection in the scope of this question.
I am pretty sure that a certain level of access is necessary for investment (as I write I am travelling through the Black Country whose industry, I believe, was at one time limited to small items such as nails despite its natural resources since before the canals the only transport option was by pack horse).
Oops – I meant GH (obviously).
@ GH who said, “There is a persistent myth that investment follows ease of access – ”
Does this also apply to proposed new railways? (Without getting into new arguments, I simply wonder whether this ‘persistent myth’ is universal with proposed new transport projects)
@Caspar Lucas – stepping back from the specific airport issue, there is a wider issue as to whether good access aids inward investment. The evidence is very far from clear. Some studies of, for example, motorway junctions near major cities, suggest that easy access simply causes secondary and tertiary settlements to lose out to existing well established places – eg Cardiff/Newport, Leeds/everywhere else in W Yorks, Newcastle/Sunderland and Gateshead. The specific problem for airports is that the highest volumes proportionately (Malcolm!) tend to be generated by non-business traffic, so the catalyst for better train services tends to be things like the charter market.
I agree this hasn’t always been so – as you say mediaeval and early post-modern settlements not on the waterway systems struggled – but then their prime (only) business involved the movement of heavy goods, though there were some remarkable exceptions – eg the Derbyshire lead mines.
@Castlebar – well, that certainly used to be the case, but nowadays we have reasonably robust techniques for at least having a stab at the development consequences of a new piece of infrastructure. The only problem- and it’s probably a killer – is the question of whether new investment is simply mobile investment re-locating from somewhere else -obviously to the detriment of that other place. I haven’t seen a robust answer to that – HS2 consultants attempted some heroic modelling of the whole UK economy but left the basic question unanswered as to whether its benefits are achieved simply by focussing the nationally available growth in the places served by HS2. The same doubts apply to airports and other investments.
@ GH Thank you for your very comprehensive answer.
It begs another question. Is this “……investment [that] follows ease of access……”, actually ‘new money’, or just investment money that would otherwise have been invested somewhere else?
@Castlebar – sorry, I was obscure: your question is precisely the area of doubt. And there is no clearcut answer – perhaps others have seen something to help? To move the question into Caspar’s territory, maybe the question doesn’t matter if you are attracting mobile investment to the UK from, say, France, but I haven’t seen any studies that could answer even that point.
In parentheses, this is precisely the argument that raged within DTp over railway closures (and Settle-Carlisle in particular). Did keeping a line open simply attract new investment away from somewhere else (and if so,where)? Trying to turn that into a CBA analysis was, err, tricky and usually led to various cautious risk assessments with wide brackets of outcomes… Indeed, the areas of doubt were such that eventually,Ministers were convinced that they couldn’t successfully defend any judicial review (JR) on the point. It was that breakthrough that actually stopped S&C closing.
[Losing a JR on that point wouldn’t half have damaged government regional policy, too…]
Yes there have been some studies to suggest that transport improvements don’t always benefit and area. But that could be because of several variables. Such as a resistance to new development in an area and therefore did not gain many of the benefits to a changing transport geography. Wanting to concentrate development in declining town centres, where the only interest was on out of town business parks etc, next to new motorways, resisting new suburban housing estates to encourage commuters etc.
[The rest was snipped as it is very vague and does not provide any facts. LBM]
@rational plan – that just emphasises the range of highly uncertain (and in many cases unmeasurable) variables. Specific human intervention (the CEO lives nearby – did anyone mention Reading upgrade, or Cotswold line upgrade a generation back?), land ownership , and such things as a supply of clean water (eg brewing and papermaking); transport was only part – and a relatively late part – of it; the industrialisation of the Black Country preceded the building of the canals there by a whole generation, and in Yorkshire, the start of the textile industry preceded canals by more than that. Much more had to do with population growth and agricultural improvement (which both released labour and enabled towns and industry to grow). Just try modelling all that.
More recently, the quality of the housing stock has been an issue – and even there (especially there) perception has been as important as anything measurable. I still cherish a full page advertisement from Peterborough Development Corporation aimed at the middle classes; “Your questions about Peterborough answered” First Question: “Will I have to live in a corporation house? ” Answer: “No. there are plenty of high quality houses in the surrounding villages”.
SACTRA (Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment) produced a major report on the economic impact of new trunk roads and motorways in the 1980s. Their conclusion was that more trunk road investment, by reducing the overall cost of transport per mile, increased centralisation of production and distribution as the savings to be gained from economies of scale outweighed any overall increase in the costs of transport resulting from longer distances. Where the centralisation took place was, of course, near the transport link, but far more influenced by factors such as land and labour costs. This tends to favour rural and urban fringe locations, it also favours (for national distribution) locations towards the centre of Great Britain.
When I first worked on this issue it was said that an optimal distribution network for Great Britain would have 8 or 9 distribution centres but the development of the trunk road and motorway system has brought this down to as little as 3, though other factors now suggest it is 4 or 5.
A good example of how this works can be seen in the Courage Brewers in the early 1980s. They started off with four breweries in the south east, 2 in central London (including one on the south bank), one in Reading and one in Alton. The opening of the M4 allowed them to centralise all their brewing at a new brewery just outside Reading and ship 80% of their output back into London. Without the M4 that would not have been economic. But it resulted in an overall net loss of jobs, a particular loss of jobs in London and a handsome profit for Courage as they sold their two central London sites for a tidy packet.
Railway investment doesn’t have the same impact because you can’t distribute by rail and airport access has impact only for those industries and sectors where time sensitive imports and exports make up a significant element of work. As far as people are concerned I think Graham H is absolutely right. Neither the precise location of the airport or the increasing number of direct flights really make much difference.
@timbeau: we may well get a byelection in the near future in SW London since both the Labour and Conservative candidates for mayor are sitting MPs
Indeed, the Conservative candidate has promised that if the government goes ahead with Heathrow expansion he will resign as an MP and trigger a by-election. Running for Mayor gives him a handy excuse not to run at the by-election and risk losing.
I appreciate the learned debate above, but do not feel much the wiser on my original and specific point (while accepting my part in the thread drift).
To summarise, the UK currently has one major hub airport (Heathrow), with future development appearing to be balanced between further expansion there or an effective (or, more likely perhaps, ineffective) sharing of hub status with Gatwick.
Geography and transport links currently make access to both these locations inconvenient, particularly if you place a value on rail transport, from that swathe of the country served by rail services out of Euston (and Marylebone) – including the not insignificant places known as the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Merseyside.
The HS2/Crossrail link at Old Oak Common will considerably ease access from/to Heathrow from this part of Great Britin (and HS2’s north east branch will alter patterns for other regions). However, travel to/from Gatwick will remain inconvenient.
My postulation is that this extra connectivity between major conurbations and the UK’s principal international gateway could be a Good Thing in economic terms for those conurbations, compared to today.
Comments please – but I would hope for justification if, say Crossrail links between Heathrow and the West End/City/Docklands are deemed Good but easing regional connectivity with Heathrow is deemed Bad!
@Caspar Lucas – Put very simply, the answer to your exam question as set is that there probably isn’t a clearcut answer… (Proponents and opponents of expansion will give you opposite views,of course, but there really isn’t enough data and analysis to make them robust). On the one hand, it is possible that your average international business based in Brum will now stay put there (or just possibly relocate from somewhere else – which is what the “learned debate” about mobile industry was all about) or it’s possible that they will move/have moved tobe a mere cab ride away from LHR anyway (if the ability to jump on a plane is so vital to them). So – it’s not that better regional connectivity is a Bad Thing, it’s rather that it may either have very limited consequences or perhaps even unexpected ones.
Why is this different to CrossRail – well, that route probably (no, certainly…!) already includes a very high proportion of the nation’s firms who do want to jump on aeroplanes at the drop of a hat, do in fact so jump now, and will find it easier still in the future – it’s hardly about relocating business at all and I have never seen that claimed.
Caspar, Gatwick seems to just get busier and busier, despite it being in “an inconvenient location” for passengers from the Euston and Marylebone catchment areas.
@Caspar Lucas
The case for a single hub airport has, in any case, not been completely proved. New York functions very well with two hub airports and a further large domestic airport. Tokyo functions well without anything resembling what we would think of as a hub airport. The proponents of a hub airport argue that the needs of transfer traffic justify a larger airport than would otherwise be needed for the city and hinterland on its own. This is clearly more of a dubious argument for London than say for Amsterdam or Vienna where the city’s own drawing power is very much less. In any case the trend is for more point-to-point flights which are, in any case, far more popular. The hub-and-spoke business model for air traffic – even intercontinental – is far less strong than it was.
So the priority for Brum should, to my mind, be to attract a wider range of airlines and destinations from Birmingham Airport rather than looking for better links to the London Airports. If your focus is on the London Airports then you are putting Birmingham in competition with London, Bristol and other cities in the broad South East of England, while the West Midlands as a whole is in competition with areas like the Thames Valley and Cambridge-Stansted corridor. Birmingham and the West Midlands are fighting those sort of competitions with one hand behind their backs becasue they are still further away. Better services at Birmingham means ther terms of the competition are different and more favourable to the West Midlands, while even better services at Manchester give the West Midlands a better chance than at London.
@Caspar Lucas:
It’s complicated.
Hub airports offer few benefits outside their local area of effect. Passengers changing planes at Heathrow rarely, if ever, leave the airport itself, so they don’t affect the wider city’s economy. All they do is offer more (generally low-paid) jobs for the locals. Furthermore, many customers don’t go to Heathrow or Gatwick by rail: few trains are designed with luggage in mind, and both airports are well inside London’s commuter belt, so it’s the commuters who are prioritised by transport planners and service providers.
Hub airports tend to be self-contained local economies and make a profit primarily for their owners. The hospitality industry (hotels, convention centres, etc.) benefits, but that just means you end up with a bunch of the same old hotel chains and an occasional convention centre near each airport. Again, the employment opportunities are of poor quality at best: few people aspire to a career in cleaning hotel rooms.
Hub airports like Heathrow do have some advantages for major businesses, but the “agglomeration effect” London has witnessed means even that is less useful than it once was: Why book a flight from your HSBC HQ to the HQ of Citi, or another financial services company, when they’re all in London already? The benefit of agglomeration is that everyone you need to network with is in the same city. Given this, the availability of a nearby hub airport is not as important as it once was.
(HS2 could help spread that agglomeration effect into Birmingham and, possibly, Manchester as well, so it’s not quite as white an elephant as some seem to believe. After all, 30 minutes from Euston isn’t that much longer than the time it’ll take to get from Old Oak Common to Canary Wharf via Crossrail.)
Fundamentally, a hub airport can be built anywhere, geography permitting. As interchanging passengers don’t leave the airport, they won’t care where it is.
“The proponents of a hub airport argue that the needs of transfer traffic justify a larger airport than would otherwise be needed for the city and hinterland on its own”
It’s not the needs of transfer traffic, rather the benefits of transfer traffic.
I would say that the proponents of a hub airport would argue that transfer traffic makes more routes and/or greater frequencies commercially viable, which is to the benefit of point-to-point traffic.
New York is one of the only, if not the only, example of two hubs in one city. British Airways tried to use both Gatwick and Heathrow as a hub, and it appears that other than some very specific destinations, Gatwick isn’t really opperating as a hub for them. I imagine that if Heathrow was big enough, British Airways would move out of Gatwick.
It might be possible to operate both Heathrow and Gatwick as hubs, if one of two alliances were willing to use Gatwick. But, a lot of transfer traffic transfers between alliances at Heathrow.
As an aside, I am fascinated by the comparison of airports and railways. We subsidise our railways and tax our airports. We are willing to push through schemes like HS2 with public funding and a ‘moot’ business case. We stiffle airport expansion which private investors are willing to fund. I know some of the reasons why, but the outcomes are quite strikingly different.
The “Hub & Spoke” theory began to be questioned after it was tried with London Transport’s “Bus re-shaping plan” back in the late 1960s. It is, like many things, wonderful and must work in theory, but funnily enough in practice, there is always an “unknown unknown” that stops it working according to the original plan.
@quinlet -and it’s noticeable that aircraft manufacturers are beginning to find that their product range is out of sync with the decline in relative importance of hub and spoke -eg the sales of the Dreamliner are reportedly way below target.
@Lurker who seldom posts:
Airports are taxed because they make a profit. However, they are also subsidised quite heavily: I’m sure you’ve heard of “Duty Free Shopping”, the reduced taxes on aviation fuel, and, of course, there’s the small matter of the national air traffic control services, which, last time I checked, was paid for by the government, not the airport owners.
Railways receive a very ‘visible’ subsidy because of their visible nature. However, roads are also subsidised very heavily, though few are aware of just how much they cost the taxpayer. An airport with no publicly subsidised road access would never get off the ground.
Subsidies are everywhere. It’s just not always branded as such.
Re Graham H,
“and it’s noticeable that aircraft manufacturers are beginning to find that their product range is out of sync with the decline in relative importance of hub and spoke -eg the sales of the Dreamliner are reportedly way below target.”
??? But the dreamliner was theoretically designed for point to point not hub and spoke. However a significant number of the orders (and deliveries) appear to have been for airlines on routes that have a decent hub at one end (Tokyo, Heathrow, LAX, NY and the middle east hubs)
@ngh – sorry,I meant its larger sibling.
Perhaps the unexpected (to some) success of ELL, Wll and the Overground suggest that as far as rail travel is concerned, the days of hub and spoke are over and this might apply to air travel too. Overground’s figures prove that not everyone wants to go into the hub, then come back out again. M25 possibly ditto. Why not with air travel?
Transfer traffic is of itself no economic benefit to the city where the transfer takes place. Just more noise and pollution. Since any shopping at the airport is duty free we don’t even get any VAT from the transfer passengers!
If you want people to visit you, your office needs to be convenient for transport, but if you want to visit people yourself, where you live matters more than where you work.
In my limited experience of business travel, if people are flying to a client, conference etc, they start from home and return there – even though my office is within walking distance of stations with direct services to four of London’s five airports (the fifth requires a cross-platform interchange until Crossrail arrives).
Between them, Gatwick, Stansted and Birmingham serve the Home Counties very well. Heathrow’s links are very much aimed at London – this is inevitable because although it has a large hinterland to the west, it is in a wide arc which would be difficult to serve by one line – a Reading – Heathrow service will be of little use to Surrey or Bucks.
As a matter of interest, how many tph would be needed to get everyone to Heathrow who work at or fly from the airport? (i.e if there were no buses, cars or taxis)
@Castlebar – there is the interesting and closely related question,however, of whether through trains rather than connecting services are becoming more popular. Current franchise specs and open access proposals tend towards the former and suggestions for a better connecting “grid” of services a la Suisse have been brushed way with scorn.
Back on topic – sort of – I believe (mainly on the basis of the practical experience of everyone I have ever talked to – a useful sample) that the punters do not use air travel in the same way as train travel. The former is infrequent,usually planned in advance, and tends to occupy much of a working day, unlike most train travel. In theory (aha!) this should mean that the disadvantages of changing planes are less than those for rail, although the luggage problem and the infrequency of the onward spoke connexions are major issues.
The hub and spoke model for airports such as Heathrow is here to stay, because of the economics of it for long haul. It’s got very little to do with the distance range of aircraft.
Of course travellers prefer point-to-point rather than hubbing (assuming the same price), or put it another way, that is why we often see a hubbing option at a lower ticket price than a point-to-point option. For some origins and destinations, hubbing is the only option – not enough travellers want to go from the O to the D to make point-to-point viable.
I think in London we take for granted the destinations to, and frequencies with, which we can fly from Heathrow. This is because Heathrow has strong point-to-point and transfer.
The reason hubs don’t work well for short haul is the proportion of additional travel time compared to point-to-point. I can see this argument extending to rail, but not to the M25. The reason I use the M25 is because central London is too congested.
New York functions with two hubs because airlines grew at both airports. Also there are pros and cons of JFK and Newark, depending what part of New York you are going to. Heathrow and Gatwick are not the same. Heathrow is the prime airport, closer to London and the network of Motorways the West and North of London. If ringway C (I think) had been built then the M23 could have been built through South London. It is Gatwick abysmal road access to the Capital that holds it back, plus the joy of being reliant on a single Motorway, with limited alternative routes.
But despite this Gatwick has done well and grown with the dead hand of BAA. As it has the title of the busiest single runway airport in the World, I think it deserves another for just that aspect alone.
In theory if one of the alliances could be persuaded to move to Gatwick, it would be the cheapest solution all round and allow BA to expand at Heathrow. Unliek CHINA or other countries we don’t live in that sort of place where the state can tell companies to do that.
As Heathrow airlines can charge higher fares and is the preference of all the 1st and business class passengers no airline is going to give up their slots.
Build Gatwicks second runway, let new entrants grow there and maybe the rise in landing fees at Heathrow will encourage people to change airports. I’d assume in a functioning market fees would rise at Heathrow compared to a constrained Gatwick.
The issue is not the travelling patterns today, but what the travelling patterns will be in 20 to 30 years time, and no amount of modeling or studying can accurately answer that question – it is just too complicated. At some point, all you can do is make your best guess and go with it.
Re Lurker,
Agreed. What many fail to realise (being taken in by the airports more far flung destionation mantra) in the great airport debate is that there aren’t actually that many long haul travellers overall from the South-East most travel is short haul and point to point* (and also mostly not business as has already been pointed out earlier). [The most popular passeneger destination is Dublin] the key drivers for the majority of passengers appear to be overall journey time, convienince (frequency of flights and airport accessibility) and price hence increaed capacity at multiple easily accessible airports with lowish landing fees might benefit far more users including business especially and emerging markets might not be providing as much potential for export growth as aniticpated a few years ago.
*Interestingly most of our big export trading partners are also short haul – 8 of the top 10 (Germany, France, Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium Spain, Italy, Switzerland – in size order)
@Lurker
The issue is not about the range of planes being delivered but the size. The A380 was designed with long distance hub-and-spoke operation in mind. As Graham H has pointed out, sales are below target. The big growth market now is for planes a little bit smaller because these can be used on more point-to-point routes. In other words, you don’t need so many passengers to want to fly to a more secondary destination to justify a direct flight.
To look at this in the London context, it’s not so much the range of destinations available from Heathrow, but from all the London airports. Put together, you can get more direct flights from London to more cities in the world than anywhere else. Some of these do go from Gatwick or Stansted rather than Heathrow, but if you live within London (pace everybody who doesn’t) on balance it makes less difference which airport the flight goes from, unless you live close to one of the airports. I know of few people who will only fly from Haethrow becasue they like the airport apart from those who live in outer west London – and then it’s all about location.
Re Rational Plan,
“Build Gatwicks second runway, let new entrants grow there and maybe the rise in landing fees at Heathrow will encourage people to change airports. I’d assume in a functioning market fees would rise at Heathrow compared to a constrained Gatwick.”
Amen but Heathrow won’t want a functioning market as lenders might be less keen to loan the money required for expansion.
@ Anomnibus 0901 – Furthermore, many customers don’t go to Heathrow or Gatwick by rail: few trains are designed with luggage in mind, and both airports are well inside London’s commuter belt, so it’s the commuters who are prioritised by transport planners and service providers.
And yet we have several examples around London where very valuable train paths are turned over to airport specific shuttle services to the detriment of commuters. If we didn’t have the Stansted Express I rather suspect commuters in the Lower Lea Valley within Greater London would have rather better peak time services. Ditto via Croydon and ditto on the lines into Paddington. You can also argue that commuters are further compromised because some of their services are routed via Airports and thus their trains are unduly overcrowded. I am not saying there are easy answers to how you provide sufficiently attractive services for arguably different market sectors when you have constrained infrastructure. I wonder whether our friends in Japan have lessons for us because their airports tend to have tiered service options – non stop expresses, semi fasts and locals and somehow manage to squash all those alongside very intensive other forms of rail services.
As an aside I have found it fascinating to see so many “givens” in terms of aviation and development policy being shown as unproven / very questionable given no firm evidence.
@quinlet
“who will only fly from Haethrow becasue they like the airport apart from those who live in outer west London ”
And for a wide swathe of SW London, even under the Heathrow flightpath, Gatwick is easier to get to anyway.
@Graham H
“Current franchise specs and open access proposals tend towards the former and suggestions for a better connecting “grid” of services a la Suisse have been brushed way with scorn.”
Partly because honouring connections seems to be a thing of the past – closing the doors in your face gets your train to London on time and has the bonus of leaving the rival* company providing the incoming connection responsible for what is now a 60 minute delay instead of five, improving the comparison between you.
* I know they should be seen as subcontractors or codeshare partners, but to the operators they are rivals in the competition for the respective franchises when they next come up
” the punters do not use air travel in the same way as train travel. . ”
But the rail operators, Branson in particular, have been trying to get the punters to use rail travel more like air travel for decades. (As if that were a positive!)
Hence the premature junking of mark 3 stock for the dire Pendolinos.
Hence the huge premium for turn-up-and-go tickets over train-specific advance-purchase tickets. It is all very well advertising a train every 20 minutes to Birmingham, but if you have an advance ticket there is only one train you can use, and woe betide you if you miss it so you have to turn up in plenty of time to watch the earlier ones go out.
@timbeau – I very strongly support your last para – the whole VT fares policy (a) wastes scarce capacity, (b) is a perversion of the use for which they are paid subsidy, and (c) actually doesn’t raise revenue (see my earlier remarks about WC performance over the longer term).
Lurker who seldom posts says “I think in London we take for granted the destinations to, and frequencies with, which we can fly from Heathrow.
Quite. People who say that host countries do not benefit from having a hub are missing this very important point.
England would still have this benefit if the hub were to shift to Boris Island, or if Heathrow were allowed to expand without limit. But under any other scenario, it will gradually dwindle away, as hubbers drift to Schiphol or elsewhere.
Although maybe it will not matter in the long run, as flying gradually drifts back to being outside the budget of most people anyway.
The whole point to point flying argument is overplayed, especially for intercontinental travel. In the past someone travelling Austin Texas to Nice in France was in for a long journey, with a flight to Houston or Dallas before either going to London or Paris for a connecting flight, now BA have launched a direct flight and people can fly to Europe and direct and change to just one more flight cutting down on the stages.
Airliner net is full of story’s of mid size american cities trying to entice Airlines to launch inter-continental flights to Europe and Asia.
The aim is to get to the point where they have 2 flights to two hubs on each continent.
There is constant data mining to see if enough passengers are connecting via a hub between two city pairs. And if enough passengers exist, especially if they pay to sit at the front, then airlines will launch a flight.
What we are seeing are the decline(relatively) of Hub to Hub flying.
There will never be enough passengers for a St Louis – Manchester flight and certainly not Stansted, these flights need onwards connections. It’s St Louis – Europe in reality.
@Malcolm:
I keep hearing this same argument in favour of hub airports, yet I’ve never seen any concrete evidence to support it. Manchester or Leeds benefit not one whit economically from Heathrow’s hub status: if I’m flying out from Manchester or East Midlands airports, what difference does it make if I have to catch my connecting flight to Dubai at Heathrow or Frankfurt?
Furthermore, even London barely benefits from a hub airport. London is a major world city and has no shortage of connections to all its major trading destinations.
If a destination is important to the UK’s economy, there’d be direct flights there regardless of the airport’s status as a hub. If direct flights cannot be justified without the hub component, then said destinations clearly aren’t that important and would not be missed.
I contend, therefore, that it’s the smaller destinations that benefit from a direct link with hub airports like Heathrow, not vice-versa! I.e. direct flights to, say, Shannon, or Odense, are of far more economic benefit to those destinations than to the British economy.
Heathrow’s continued status as a hub airport is, consequently, just not that important either nationally, or even regionally. It certainly isn’t necessary for London’s continued existence as a major economic centre.
@anomnibus: I concede that places outside Heathrow’s reasonably-convenient-access range (which stretches, I would argue to about Stoke-on-Trent and Exeter) do not benefit very much from the existence of a hub at Heathrow. But I still reckon that those inside do. Your “ London is a major world city and has no shortage of connections to all its major trading destinations ” is true, but what we do not know, and cannot easily model, is how good those connections will be when England loses its hub.
However, I suspect, somewhat fatalistically, that the people who decide these matters will listen to neither you nor me. It will be decided by the men with serious money and power. (Perhaps more importantly, they won’t listen either to the
miserableWest-London-dwellers whose life is made a misery by aircraft noise).@ Malcolm
“Miserable West London dwellers”? What an appalling condemnation of all of us who, like myself, live in west London. I think an apology would be appropriate. We are not miserable, but we could get angry if we read any more insulting drivel.
Dr Richards Beeching: My big apologies. I meant “West London dwellers who life is made miserable by aircraft noise.” I was foolishly trying to save electrons. I will ask a moderator (conveniently to hand) to alter the wording. [Done]
@Malcolm said “But under any other scenario, it will gradually dwindle away, as hubbers drift to Schiphol or elsewhere.”
1) Heathrow is already a hub airport – I know people have been disingenuous and pretending that the UK doesn’t have one to justify demolishing large villages in Middlesex (or bird reserves in Kent) – but Heathrow is a hub airport and the busiest airport in Europe (and the third busiest in the world in 2014).
2) Gatwick is almost a hub airport already – while it is a gamble, R2 will probably make it one. R2 at Gatwick won’t stop Heathrow being a hub (though R3 at Heathrow will make Gatwick hub impossible), so it’s far from an issue if it doesn’t become a second hub airport with an alliance based there, rather than Heathrow: London will still have a hub airport. R2 ought to make Gatwick busier than Schiphol even without a serious hub being formed there – given how the existing runway is the runway that takes more passengers than any other in the world and traffic is growing at a faster rate than Schiphol’s.
3) London is the world’s number 1 airport traffic destination by some way (New York is second and about 80% of London’s figures. Paris is 4th with under 70% of the traffic of London) – even without the needed new runway. The idea that airlines wouldn’t continue to use London as a key node on their network just because we didn’t make an eggs-all-in-one-basket super-hub is poppycock!
Si: I mostly agree. Referring to the hub status “dwindling away” presupposes that it exists at present. Obviously right now Heathrow is the “type specimen” of a hub airport. On your point 3, nobody believes that all the airlines using London as a key hub are going to suddenly cease doing so – unless their preferred development option happens. But some people are saying, with some plausibility, that they might gradually drift away if nothing is done.
I’ve seen it claimed that Schiphol is already the de facto hub airport for the UK given there are flights between Schiphol and 24 UK airports while Heathrow only connects to 7…
International Airlines Group (BA) have been making noises about doing more hubbing through Dublin and there are plans for a second runway there. It is possible to clear US immigration at Dublin rather than queue upon arrival and that may be an advantage for some people,
To the extent that LHR can offer more direct flights to more places, it will cease to be a hub – and everyone benefits. There is no particular merit per se in being a hub and only gigantists are fazed by the relative sizes of hubs.
@ Malcolm
Thank you
Apology accepted
@ Malcolm – sure, if nothing happens, but if a runway is built at Gatwick, rather than Heathrow, that’s not nothing!
@ Reynolds 953 – indeed, but does Heathrow really need flights to UK destinations that Schiphol serves but it misses? Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, City, Southend, Southampton, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, East Midlands and Norwich is 13 UK airports that Schiphol serves and Heathrow doesn’t that Heathrow doesn’t need to. Liverpool, Humberside, Exeter and Durham/Tees Valley are all debatable, given relatively decent surface access from these places. Inverness is the only one really worth serving that Heathrow doesn’t and Schiphol does.
Si: I agree that enlarging Gatwick is not nothing. But it is not clear to me that enlarging Gatwick will make any difference to whether the Austin (Texas) to Nice (France) flow (for one tiny example) is best served by a UK hub or a continental one. If it makes no difference, then congestion at Heathrow may push the balance towards the continental hubs. But I am disappearing into the realms of fact-free speculation, so I will stop.
BA is the Airline for North American destinations. Indeed Britain is well placed geographically to act as hub for Trans Atlantic flights.
Much has been made about how important it is to connect with China etc, but recent efforts in Asia have been underwhelming. Chengdu is supposed to be bleeding money still.
Meanwhile new Heathrow flights to San Diego, Las Vegas and Austin have all performed well. Both Austin and Las Vegas have out performed expectations and have been upgauged several times. Las Vegas has already been bumped up to a 747 and is no looking at doubly daily flights. Turns out as Las Vegas has gone up market First and Business seats to Europe are seriously lacking.
As mentioned before London is the top international destination and for a lot of the smaller cities they need both Origin and Destination to London travellers as well as connections. BA’s core area seems to be Connecting North America to Europe and Africa. Hence BA now announcing San Jose.
Re rational Plan,
Chengdu – Having been there a while ago I still can’t believe they started that route, the only way I could see it working financially* is if there was high value cargo in the hold (many 747s on HK/China routes seemed to have Cargo at the back as well). Theoretically It has very good air links to other cities (west China Hub) but not much direct export industry locally, Chong Quin very slightly further east might be better destination for trade purposes (where several sensible countries (inc UK) have consulates with trade assistance and is the bigger international western China hub (Star and Sky team) and a big freight hub (something the UK is comparatively bad at compared to our continental neighbours)
I suspect generous terms were agreed to help get Chengdu on the international flight map of non Chinese airlines given everyone else went to Chong Quin. (Air China was paid lots by the regional government to put Chengdu on the international map in the first place as they couldn’t really see the point otherwise!).
*unless giant panda tourism really took off…
quinlet 13 October 2015 at 21:36
“favours (for national distribution) locations towards the centre of Great Britain.”
But that’s huge area; roughly bounded by a line joining Liverpool, Preston, York, Leicester, Coventry and Wolverhampton.
I don’t yet see it bring renewed prosperity to Stoke-on-Trent.
The centre of Great Britain is supposed to be approximately … Weedon
( Close to Kilsby Tunnel )
It is interesting to note, vis-vis the ‘more destinatioons can be justified from a hub airport’ argument, that when BA took over BMI a few years ago – primarily to get the runway slots at Heathrow – the first thing they did was to shut down most of the BMI flights to destinations in developing countries in central Asia and the Middle East and replace them with more flights to established destinations and some more cities in the USA. They closed down the flights to Asia because they were not sufficiently economic to keep going. That gives a very clear message that however much runway space Heathrow has, airlines are not going to fly uneconomic routes to strange sounding places in far away lands. The transfer market argument does not make any difference in these cases because BA has already got a very well developed feeder network into Heathrow from across Europe – and we know that with a third runway the number of UK destinations to be served from Heathrow is scheduled to drop from 7 to 4.
@Alan Griffiths
yes it is a huge area but look at the growth in distribution centres near the motorway junctions in that area. They don’t actually employ that many people, but they cwertainly generate a huge amount of HGV freight traffic.
Re BA and BMI, it will take years for that takeover to shake out. The problem BA has is it does not have enough Long Haul planes to launch many new destinations. In the next few years it’s only gaining a a few a year (net, as it’s dumping a lot of old 747’s). People are still waiting on BA to announce the second part of it’s long haul strategy and make a big order.
As slots have to used or lost it used BMI planes to increase frequency to key European cities as a place holder. A lot of traditional leisure destinations in europe that used to be served from Gatwick have appeared back at Heathrow.
Received wisdom on A Net is that as BA acquires more long haul metal, more destinations will be launched and those European flights cut back to more sensible frequencies with bigger planes and a shuffling of leisure flights back to Gatwick.
@Greg
“The centre of Great Britain is supposed to be approximately … Weedon”
Very approximately! Or are you anticipating Scottish independence?
The OS has identified the geometric centre of England to be located twenty miles further up the A5, close to the MIRA test track.
The OS put the centre of GB in the Forest of Bowland, in Lancashire (as the geometric centre)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2271914.stm#story
Furthest point from the sea is in Derbyshire (or Staffordshire if you include tidal waters such as the Trent up to Newark) although Meriden claims to be the traditional centre.
The population centroid of GB has gradually moved south across Derbyshire during the 20th century, and by the turn of the century had crossed the border into Leicestershire, near the M42 at Appleby Parva. A more recent calculation suggests it’s moved a little further south east since then
http://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2015/04/Centre_of_Population_of_Great_Britain.html
Still some way to go to reach Weedon though.
Re rational Plan
“Received wisdom on A Net is that as BA acquires more long haul metal, more destinations will be launched and those European flights cut back to more sensible frequencies with bigger planes and a shuffling of leisure flights back to Gatwick”
Which is why another runway at Gatwick would also be very useful as the charges would be usefully lower for “leisiure” destinations.
Re Rational Plan
It still makes my point that BA would rather use the ex BMI slots and planes to increase frequencies to other European destinations than to continue to serve destinations in developing countries in central Asia and the Middle East. This can only be that it makes commercial sense to do so, even if only in the short term. Hence, however many runways existed at Heathrow they would make the same commercial calculations given a fixed fleet. Therefore the argument that an extra runway would increase the number of destinations served from Heathrow is demonstrably nonsense.
timbeau
Thanks for the correction(s)
I suppose the population-centroid is the one we should be looking at in these circumstances.
quinlet: “the argument that an extra runway would increase the number of destinations served from Heathrow is demonstrably nonsense.”
erm, not really. There are many more carriers at LHR than just BA!
@AlisonW
There are indeed more carriers at Heathrow than just BA, but BA control around 50% of the slots and the range of destinations they serve is large enough for the significant changes in how they run their business to be both visible and analysable. Carriers from outside the UK, for example, are not going to change their service pattern from Heathrow as significantly – for example, Turkish Airlines are not going to switch their Heathrow flights to another country.