The Heathrow hub - who really needs to put up with it?

lostexpectation wrote:

wow 4 and 6 ?

Im a bit of the type that would go to the climate camp but I say heathrow needs a third runway.

The more runways at an airport, the less time aircraft spend circling before landing. The need for aircraft to go into holding patterns waiting for landing slots increases fuel use and CO2 emissions and also increases noise pollution in the areas over which the holding patterns take place.

It is only a matter of time before aircraft will be running on hydrogen fuel. A jet engine can burn hydrogen fuel with some modification. Hydrogen is the lightest element – the remaining issue is one of storage technology and the space the fuel will take-up in the aircraft. This will probably involve radical re-design of the airframe.

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Prof_V wrote:

True, but the demand increase resulting from the additional capacity would be likely to more than cancel out the advantages of decongestion

You can deal with that issue through pricing mechanisms. It is not an excuse to keep aircraft circling waiting for slots!

There are at least two other difficulties - the climate impact of water vapour at altitude and the time it would take for fleet replacement even once the technology became commercially available (unless you scrapped much of the existing fleet prematurely). Also, if the "radical re-design" means blended wing-body, there seems to be a lower size limit on these, which would make applying them to short-range aircraft difficult.

How much water vapour will be produced (in the context of the clouds already in the sky)? I find it hard to believe that it would be material. Anyway most of the world needs more rain :-)

I don't think it will be a blended wing-body design, it will probably be a big belly to store the hydrogen. If anything I suspect that short haul aircraft will be the first to benefit from hydrogen, because of initial storage constraints.

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dermo88 wrote:

Nothing can describe the contempt I have for London Heathrow and all it represents. Its overbearing, beaureacratic, overpriced.

The following article by Tyler Brûlé appeared in today’s International Herald Tribune on Britain’s decrepit infrastructure – including Heathrow:

While there is only one picture in the web edition, there are several in the print edition.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/17/arts/tyler18.php

In the absence of anything resembling a summer in the northern part of Europe, I've spent the last few weeks with my head down looking at nation-building, branding and reconstruction for the September issue of Monocle. While considerable space was devoted to looking at nations that are unrecognized, misunderstood or simply never heard of, I came close to forgetting to cast an eye around my more immediate surroundings and spend a little time focusing on my own backyard - Britain.

Two weeks ago, Eric Pfanner, a London correspondent for this newspaper, wrote a story about the poor state of the country's infrastructure and the general disillusionment with any company or agency charged with moving people from A to B. For Britons sitting on the beach in France or Greece, it was just the type of dispatch that would make most sensible people rethink their lifestyle and rip up their return ticket.

Those citizens and residents who do pluck up the courage to return from their summer holidays might notice that the country's image-makers have been busy with the paintbrush. In case there was some doubt on the part of passengers before, big bold signs have been posted in the immigration area of airports letting all arrivals know that they're about to cross the British border. It's hard to tell whether the border sign, looming high above the immigration officers' desks at Heathrow's terminal one, is a warning, a threat or a misleading bit of branding. Most people shuffling along with passports in hand might think they're arriving or returning home to a place called the United Kingdom - the reality is that sometime over the summer it officially became the Unraveled Kingdom.

There were no formal announcements about this rebranding in the national press - just a rapid, sustained set of stories that suggested the transformation was complete. First there was a call by Prime Minister Gordon Brown for more people to rally around the Union Jack and raise it from every rooftop - a glaring sign that a nation is coming undone if ever there was one. At the same time one part of the consortium running the London Underground caved in on itself. Next came an announcement that all departments responsible for frontier controls would come under one unified banner - complete with uniforms. This was followed by some of the worst flooding in recent history and a very public display of incompetence when the government was unable to get enough fresh water to the displaced in stranded areas.

Off the front pages, ambassadors in London were suggesting that deadlines for the 2012 Olympics were under threat due to severe labor shortages in the construction sector. Over in Lausanne, Switzerland, more than a few eyebrows were being raised at the International Olympic Committee's headquarters as Britain's crumbling transport infrastructure became a lead story in the closing days of July. Indeed, just as most of Britain and southern Europe was heading off on holiday, Heathrow had become the ugly poster child for all that was wrong with the country - it's underfunded, poorly managed, arrogant, badly designed, outdated, greedy and "not my fault, mate."
What might have been little more than a domestic story elsewhere was suddenly top of the lineup on CNN bulletins and dominating the front pages of the Financial Times and this newspaper. In the absence of an official release from No. 10 Downing Street that the country was now the Unraveled Kingdom - this was it.

The response from the government? "Not my fault, mate."

Public- and private-sector Britain approaches the last quarter of 2007 with a massive assignment that demands it not only restore public opinion at home but embark on a global campaign to also restore the confidence of everyone - from people in countries eager to invest to connecting passengers who've been put off by Brand U.K. (many Asian airlines have stopped using Heathrow as a hub, as it's too bewildering and chaotic for passengers from Taipei or Tokyo). A decade ago a bit of slick sloganeering in the form of "Cool Britannia" could gloss over all kinds of shortcomings and capture the imagination of editors and investors alike.
This time around, public relations won't win the day. The Unraveled Kingdom needs to pick up its needles and start stitching together disenfranchised communities, battered transport hubs, worn down rail links and forgotten corners of the country. At the same time it needs to breed a culture of excellence that will create benchmark businesses and public institutions, and move a marker that's currently stuck on mediocre.

Tyler Brûlé is the editor in chief of Monocle magazine.He lives in Switzerland, Sweden and Britain. He can be reached at tb@monocle.com.

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