London Airport Crisis

The London airport crisis rages on as many are indecisive on the decision on what change should be made to counteract the aviation capacity crisis. The three ideas generally are a runway added to either Gatwick or Heathrow, or the creation of a new airport “Boris Island” which is planned to be placed on the Thames estuary, between these airports the discussion has been going on a long time, until recently Heathrow and Boris Island where leading the votes but things seemed to have swung in the opposite direction.

According to a YouGov poll which consisted of 263 London councillors and it was surprising to find that a majority 38% favoured the second runway at Gatwick, 32% favoured the Estuary airport planned to have 4 run ways and just one in four voted for the expansion of Heathrow which many thought was favourite to be due the expansion, it seems although Heathrow has been hit hard by the developments of the environmental factors of the expansion.

The only issue if Gatwick was granted the expansion the airport is bound to an agreement that says they will not build a new runway until 2019 at the earliest. An expansion on Gatwick would also face major opposition from residents and environmentalists like that of Heathrow. Surprisingly however almost out of nowhere Birmingham airport have recently called for the government to abandon plans of any of these ideas and instead they have outlined plans to increase their airport to be able to handle 70 million passengers a year which is the same capacity as Heathrow. This surprisingly is seeming like quite a good idea and an alternative solution to a hard decision but I’m not sure Heathrow will be too happy as it could see Birmingham become the largest airport in the world if all goes to plan, however this wouldn’t go ahead or be completed by 2032.