Das Drei-Airport-System in London: Heathrow, Gatwick und Stansted

 

deutsche Zusammenfassung des Beitrages von John Rowcliffe

 

 

Als früherer Beamter im Umweltministerium von Großbritannien war J. Rowcliffe u.a. mit dem Projekt eines neuen Londoner Flughafens betraut. Seine heutigen Ausführungen bittet er jedoch nicht als offizielle, sondern als private Stellungnahme anzusehen.

 

Heathrow ist der meistfrequentierte Flughafen der Welt. Seine Tätigkeit umfasst drei Flughäfen, wobei in Heathrow selbst nur 60 % des Gesamtaufkommens abgewickelt werden. Die drei erwähnten Flughäfen sind als eine Einheit anzusehen und werden von der privaten Gesellschaft BAA besessen und gemeinsam operiert.

 

Im Jahr 1999 wurden insgesamt über 100 Millionen Passagiere abgefertigt, 62 Mio in Heathrow, 30 Mio in Gatwick und 9,5 Mio in Stansted.

 

Wiederholt wurde von den Betreibern eine Ausbau in Heathrow und später in Gatwick gefordert. Wie die beiliegende Statistik ausweist, ist es aber bei 2 Runways in Heathrow und bei jeweils 1 Runway in Gatwick und Stansted geblieben. Das eindrucksvolle Wachstum wurde trotz des abgelehnten weiteren Ausbaus erzielt.

 

Die Entfernung zwischen den Flughäfen beträgt 70 bis 120 km. Die Verbindung erfolgt über eine (häufig verstopfte) Autobahn.

 

Insgesamt ergeben sich interessante Parallelen zu Frankfurt-Rhein-Main und Frankfurt-Hahn.

THE LONDON THREE-AIRPORT SYSTEM: HEATHROW, GATWICK, STANSTED

 

Paper by John Rowcliffe

 

Thank you for inviting me to take part in this symposium. I must emphasise at the outset that, although I previously worked in the UK Department of the Environment, I have been retired for some years, and what follows is a personal, and in no way an official UK Government, view.

 

When people talk about “London Airport”, they usually mean London Heathrow. That is not surprising, for Heathrow is London’s – and the UK’s – major airport. Indeed, although there are much larger in the USA, Heathrow is still the busiest international airport in the world.

 

But the London airport system goes beyond Heathrow. Indeed, Heathrow’s share of total London traffic is now less than 60 per cent.

 

There are in fact five airports serving London – Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, and London City Airport. The last two are quite small, handling only some six million passengers between them. So I shall concentrate on the first three.

 

There is another very good reason for looking at these three airports together. That is the fact that they are owned and managed by a single operator – BAA. And, as the latest BAA Annual Report puts it, “BAA operates Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted as an integrated three-airport system rather than as three unrelated airports.”

 

(I should mention here that since 1987, BAA has been a private company operating world wide. It manages airports in the USA and Australia as well as the UK. And the letters BAA no longer stand for anything!)

 

First then, a very brief history of these airports.

 

Heathrow was selected as the site for London’s airport immediately after the war, and began operation in 1946. Fairly soon a need was seen for a second airport to take some of the load, and to be available to take flights diverted from Heathrow.

 

The site chosen was Gatwick, some 45 km south of London, and 70 km from Heathrow. Gatwick became operational in 1958, and was at first developed to deal mainly with leisure traffic.

 

Unlike Heathrow, Gatwick had only one runway. There was space for a second, but concern about noise nuisance forced BAA to rule out the building of a second runway at least for the foreseeable future.

 

By the 1960’s, there was concern that the three runways at Heathrow and Gatwick would not be able to cope with the forecast increase in traffic. So began a search for a third airport site.

 

That search was long and complex. However, it was eventually decided, in 1985, that an airport already managed by BAA at Stansted in Essex should be expanded to become London’s third airport. Stansted is about 56 km north east of London, and about 110 km from Heathrow.

 

So London’s aviation needs are now catered for by a three-airport system. Heathrow with its two runways, and four terminals – the fourth added in 1986. Gatwick with its single runway and two terminals – the second added in 1988. And finally Stansted with its single runway and single terminal.

 

The figures for the number of passengers handled by these three airports in 1999 are – Heathrow 62 million; Gatwick 30.5 million; and Stansted 9.5 million.

 

We should note here that the increase in traffic at Gatwick and Stansted has not halted growth at Heathrow. Traffic at the other airports is now growing faster in percentage terms; but the actual increase at Heathrow is larger. Between 1985 and 1999, the increase were:

 

         Heathrow              31 to 62 million

         Gatwick               15 to 30 million

         Stansted               0.5 to 9.5 million

 

As I have mentioned, BAA manage the airport as an integrated system. So, whilst all of them handle a mix of traffic, there is some specialisation – Heathrow the prime business airport; Gatwick still more oriented towards leisure traffic; Stansted with a heavy concentration of low-cost airlines, and more cargo-only flights than the other airports.

 

At each of these airports there are stringent restrictions on night flights. In addition, grants have been made available to enable local people to insulate their homes against noise.

 

We are now approaching a time when a shortage of capacity is again foreseen. This involves two key elements in the airport system – terminals and runways.

 

First, terminals. I have referred already to the new terminals that came into operation in the 1980’s. But these are dwarfed by an enormous new development planned for Heathrow – Terminal 5. This would cover an area larger than the whole of existing central complex, with its three terminals and other facilities.

 

Terminal 5 has been the subject of a long-running public local inquiry, set up under our system of land use planning. That began in 1995 and lasted for four years. Moreover, the Inspector needs a similarly extensive time to write his Report; so that is not expected to be submitted to the Minister before 2001.

 

Second, runways. The need to plan ahead led the Department of Transport, in 1990, to set up of a Working Party to consider the need to add a further runway to the London system. This reported in 1993, and concluded that the only realistic way to create extra capacity – adding up to 40 million passenger a year – would be to build another runway at one of the existing airports. There were strong environmental objections to each site, and the Working Party spelt these out. It concluded, however, that, in terms of aviation needs, a third runway at Heathrow would be the best option.

 

An interesting point about this Working Party is that it included representatives not only of Government Departments and airport operators but also of organisations representing people living near the existing airports.

 

The Working Party were not to recommend where a new runway should be sited. That conveniently let the Government off the hook of having to take a politically controversial decision. So there has, to this day, been no clear Government statement on the way ahead. And the question of another runway for London has now been rolled up in the work launched by the new Labour Government when it came into office in 1997.

 

The new Government’s White Paper on Integrated Transport, issued in 1998, said very little about aviation. But it promised a further White Paper setting out a policy for aviation looking thirty years ahead.

 

That White Paper has not yet appeared. And I do not except it to do so before the General Election which must take place before May 2002. That applies also to the decision on Heathrow’s proposed Terminal 5.

 

The “official” view is that the Terminal 5 decision is still an open question. But it is very difficult to see how the London airport system can survive without the additional capacity that it would provide. Similarly, another runway to serve London and the South East seems inevitable.

 

So there you have it. We all hate the noise and congestion created by the other people who travel by air. We all value air travel when it enables us to get to our holiday destination, or our business meeting, quickly and cheaply. Because millions of preferences outweigh thousands of protests, I do not expect anything to stand in way of the inexorable growth of air traffic.

 

All Governments seem to agree that the desire for cheap air travel must be satisfied; and the European Union’s Open Skies policy backs that up. Your own Federal Government’s concept paper, issued in August, follows that line: and I expect the UK Government to take the same view when it produces its White Paper.

 

It is true that, on 7 September, the European Parliament voted in favour of taxing aircraft fuel as a way of curbing growth. But Member Governments have generally resisted that. And recent events do not suggest that there would be any great public enthusiasm for another tax on fuel.

 

In conclusion I would say that the London experience does show that capacity for a single city can be provided at more than one airport. But the operational interest will always be in building on existing capacity rather than in opening up new sites. Moreover, it must not be assumed that traffic growth will necessarily be welcomed elsewhere, even if there is initial support for such alternatives.

 

To end on a personal note, I was involved, in the 1970’s, with a project that would have provided London with a vast new airport on reclaimed land off the coast of Essex. That was seen as the perfect environmental solution, with no local population to be disturbed by aircraft noise.

 

However, as the project moved towards reality, local opposition became vocal. Some of that opposition was directed at the airport itself. But it was then backed up by the very much larger number of people who would have been affected by the major new road and rail links that would have been necessary to enable a major airport to be viable at a site 80 km from the City that it was to serve.

 

Moreover, although BAA, then a nationalised industry responsible to Ministers, officially supported the proposal. It was known that they were unhappy about developing a brand new site so far from London.

 

That project came to nothing. There were wider reason for that – in particular a change of Government and a quadrupling of oil prices. But the fierce local opposition, and the aviation industry’s evident lack of enthusiasm, also played their part in sinking the project.

 

I can only hope that your ambitions to find another airport to take the load off Frankfurt Rhein Main meet with greater success.