3rd Runway at Heathrow

Everyone wants good and easy travel and sadly its the price that has to be paid they wont come north (although Birmingham is not north in my opinion ) as everything tends to be geared towards London. There are no commercial airports anywhere near where we live and i feel for the people around the proposed runway i would hate it

See the government is too frit to put up a candidate for the by-election. So the voter is being denied to vote on the new runway, presuming the Tory candidate would support the new runway. Democracy is not this governments strong point is it?

Heard on the radio that the runway will be uphill...! And there will have to be a ramp over the M25!
Sounds like a good plan....

This will be another government shambles.

It's not going to happen in the near future, Morgana!

Your FB friend's child will probably be at Uni by the time work actually starts!

Great comments. Pollution is one of the biggest threats and I wonder if the government will just change the laws and up the legal limit. Someone I know works at a school near Heathrow and posted on F B yesterday that she will lose her home her job and her child will have to find a new school. My heart went out to her.

cc I see no mention of rerouting the M25 but they are talking about as you say a tunnel or taking the runway over the M25, whatever way they do it there will be many years of disruption to those living in the area.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37773052

When it is dark to the west of London you can see a queue of plane lights flying in one after the other, after already being stacked for ages waiting to join this queue. Apparently the stacking system is often full so they would have to be stacked elsewhere, causing yet more areas to be disturbed.

To me it seems crazy to fly even more planes over such a heavily populated area. It isn't just a matter of the additional noise but also the additional risk of a major disaster due to a plane crash or other problem.

I believe that an airport to the east of London would be more sensible - plenty of empty brownfield space there, as Boris has suggested - and I understand that flight paths could be organised to disturb far fewer people. Or it could even be built on a man-made island offshore as other international cities have done.

Interesting to note than many people who fly into Heathrow are just in transit to other places and never leave the airport. Why not direct these people to airports well away from our busy centralised sites?

DH used to be a civil engineer and says that the proposed re-routing of the M25 (possibly through a tunnel) would cause really major disruption to the M4 and M25 for a very long time. And the M4 to Heathrow is already said to be the busiest stretch of motorway in Europe.

Charleygirl did you know there are 12000 civilian flights in and out of Northolt every year? It used to be 7000 but it was upped to 12000 last year no wonder it sometimes seems busy. Of course that doesn't include all the military/government/royal planes that land there.

what, about the oil or the proposals for the Thames estuary?

I will get DH to phone her
Perhaps he will be offered a job as a Government adviser

Does Theresa May know?

I can't remember what the objections were to the proposals for one in the Thames estuary

Don't worry folks!!

DH said that by the time it is finished the oil will have run out.

I live a few miles away from Heathrow but closer to RAF Northolt. For the vast majority of time I feel as though I am living in the countryside because of the lack of noise except occasionally when the RAF appear to be starting WW3 for a short space of time. I actually like looking at the different planes flying past, some low flying, so modern.

As I understand it, much of the future growth in air travel will come from the Chinese and Asian countries. Are we to tell them that they're not allowed to fly after we in the west have enjoyed such amenities fo the past 50-odd years?

We have no choice but to fly to visit our son and family in America. It's hardly a pleasure but if we want to see each other, we've no other option. Star Trek-style transportation would be much better!

There's an interesting comment here.

www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2016/10/25/theresa-may-campaigned-against-a-third-runway-at-heathrow-so

Obviously May never said she would resign if it was built.

If HS2 gets built, it could be just as quick for some Londoners to get to Birmingham airport as to Heathrow.
Heathrow Airport Holdings has spent £30 million lobbying for Heathrow.

Whilst I wouldn't want to live too near an airport, if we want to continue to enjoy holidays abroad, we have to accept it.

Heathrow and Gatwick expansion are needed. Anyone buying a house in the area in the last 20 odd years knew what could happen.

All those greenies flying to Save the World conferences so they can tell the rest of us how to behave are the ones that get my goat. Hypocrites.

Unless, somehow, actually being with people and talking to people in person really does make a difference... Hmm, now there's a thought.

Clearly there are business trips that cannot be substituted with electronics - but I am sure that there are many that could be. My DD is always flying off to things for her company and she fully acknowledges that they could be better done my email etc - and more quickly.

I was amazed last night when watching the One Show to see how a surgeon could use a smart phone on a selfie stick to tell other surgeons how to save a man's life in Syria.

It would be interesting to know how many business trips are necessary. I am sure much the flying that Theresa May has done since Brexit could have been done away with by having meetings electronically, as Luckygirl said.

Sorry, Luckygirl many, if not most, business trips do not involve a bit of a jolly, nor can the meetings be undertaken online.

DH is an engineer in the energy industry, first hydrocarbons, now wind farms. He has to be on site to check that work is done properly and safely. You cannot engineer from a distance. He has flown all over the world, including to countries liked the Congo, Angola, Sudan and I can assure you that 99.999% of his journeys and those of the many, many working engineers, technical experts, overseas sales staff and negotiators, who make the majority of business travelers are certainly not jollies.

Unless you are a board member of one of the top 100 companies in the world you travel economy, stay in international hotel chains with whom your employer has struck a deal, providing its employers occupy the back rooms overlooking the dustbins. He has twice been in real fear of his life, twice been taken to hospital on business trips, fortunately in countries with high medical standards, but it is no fun knowing your DH is in a hospital in a country 8,000 miles away where neither he nor you speak the language and few of its nationals speak English.

His business trips have occasionally involved jollies, a few more might have helped coped with the long uncertain absences and concern about unpleasant countries and, sometimes, dangerous work.

Buses, trains and cars are of course also polluters, but planes are in a different league.

"........ the problem is not just that planes burn a lot of fuel and therefore kick out plenty of CO2 per passenger. Just as important are a host of other high-altitude impacts, including vapour trails and ozone production, that are usually estimated to cause as much warming as the CO2 itself.
.......although air travel accounts for only a small fraction of global emissions (relatively few people can afford to fly), one transatlantic flight can add as much to your carbon footprint as a typical year's worth of driving."

It is also about depleting the world's resources of oil.

Many business trips amount to a bit of a jolly and the same result could have been achieved electronically.

One of the big problems of transport planning is that you do not really know what is around the corner. I am sure that when we started to criss-cross the planet with roads it was done in response to the invention of the car; if we were to look back on it and realise what trouble we were brewing in terms of pollution and environmental destruction, maybe we would have developed different ideas, or have developed rail networks more. But once the road network is there, then car production increases and so on......

I suppose the same was said about busses and trains in the beginning too.

At what cost indeed.