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

probe

The problem with Heathrow is that it has only two runways and has never been a purpose built airport. The runway limitation, and BA’s domination of slots allows them to charge an arm and a leg for airfares for flights that seldom run on time. In my view Ireland should minimise its reliance on this overcrowded facility as a point of interconnection to airports not served directly.

(a) Heathrow's two runways (3.9 and 3.6 km) are prone to weather delays - Charles de Gaulle has 4 runways (2 of them 4.2 km long) and Schiphol has 6 (longest 3.8 km). A long wait for landing and take-off slots is guaranteed at LHR as a result of runway capacity shortage, increasing the end to end journey time, increasing the risk of not making a connection and the risk of arriving late at one’s destination. The shortage of runway capacity increases the probability of weather related delays at that airport, because poor visibility forces them to increase the gap between each runway movement. Britain’s air traffic control system (NATS) is under funded and running on antiquated systems. The air traffic congestion in the NATS/Benelux Eurocontrol/Northern Germany zone guarantees delays – which also causes delays at Amsterdam.

(b) Heathrow air fares on BA are probably the most expensive in Europe – about twice as expensive in business class as Air France/KLM (not exactly known to be the cheapest airlines in Europe).

(c) All six T2 CDG terminals (T2 A, B, C, D, E and F) are stuck together like Siamese twins. One can quickly walk from one to the other or take the connecting shuttle. Hence if you avoid using Aer Lingus (who uses T1) and use Air France (Cityjet) (who use T2F) end to end, you can connect at CDG for long haul flights in as little as 30 to 40 minutes. If you use Aer Lingus, you have to connect using the new CDG VAL train which takes 8 minutes to get from T1 to T2 – and bring your bags with you – [Aer Lingus seems to have given up on interline baggage connectivity].

(d) Heathrow has no mainline railway station. CDG has two railway stations with direct services to French cities as well as neighbouring countries. A HAFAS database printout of the departure and arrival boards for rail services for one day at CDG airport runs to 179 x A4 pages. Brussels-Midi is 75 mins by train from CDG – which is about as fast as it takes to get from Dublin Airport to other parts of Dublin at certain times of the day. Download the Paris CDG rail connection list at: http://der.probe.googlepages.com/roissy.pdf

Anyone travelling to cities within 700km of Paris would probably be better off taking the train from CDG rather than making an air connection at London.

[CDG has nothing like the span of rail connectivity of tiny Zurich airport – which manages 101 pages of nationwide rail arrivals and departures every day for a metro area of about 1 million people (ie the size of Dublin) - http://der.probe.googlepages.com/zrh.pdf

[Dublin Heuston + Connolly + Dublin Port services combined fill just 14 pages in the same format!] http://der.probe.googlepages.com/dub.pdf ]

(e) The Air France fleet is almost twice the size of BA’s – 75% of it made up of fuel efficient Airbus aircraft. The majority of BA’s fleet is gas guzzling antique Boeing kit – including the largest fleet of clapped out Boeing 747s, in the world (57 of them). Fuel surcharges and mega CO2 emissions are guaranteed to keep this heavy metal in the air. Air France's in-flight cabin service is far superior to BA's and the food and wine is better too!

(f) I’ve done a quick shopping basket comparison of long-haul air connections to 8 destinations from Dublin – Seoul, Hong Kong, Beijing, Mumbai, Riyadh, Dubai, Cape Town, Rio, and Tokyo (because Air France only fly to Dublin at present) – using both Paris CDG and LHR as interconnection hubs. While air fares vary by the minute, the bottom line shows that the French hub is about 50% faster and about 50% cheaper for business class travel than using BA/LHR.

Price and connection delay comparisons: http://der.probe.googlepages.com/connections.pdf

Data taken from www.airfrance.ie and www.ba.com

.probe


New CDG VAL inter-terminal shuttle train: http://www.aeroportsdeparis.fr/Adp/fr-FR/Passagers/Departs/ParcsDeStationnement/Paris-CDG/CDGVAL.htm

Air/rail intermodality at CDG:
http://www.uic.asso.fr/_static/gv/eurailspeed2005/docs/pres/a1/jean-marie_chevalier.pdf?PHPSESSID=43798a5956c25ba3001bae2317a526bc

Chris_533976

Thats some rant

Yeah Heathrow isnt the best. Tho they're trying for an extra runway and NIMBYs and hippies have turned up.

Going through Amsterdam is a better plan. Very well designed airport, and Ive never had problems there.

Davidth88

Boy that is some rant

I would disagree that LHR doesn't have a mainline station..... they have a link to Paddington.

However LHR is a horrible pain, all people in our office now avoid changing through LHR and go through AMS or CDG, if you go through CDG then you have to fly AF ( Cityjet ) or you end up in that wierd teletubbie world that is T1

AMS is great , and I love the way they have changed the security now so each gate has it's own security check it saves queuing .

Maybe LHR may be better when T5 opens, but put it this way , this is a typical exerience through there.

Arrive from Pudong , with 2 hrs to go for my connection to DUB. VS A340 then sits off gate for 90 mins because they can only use a few gates ( they are very long aircraft ) and they are all busy . So I miss my flight.

Then I am on the next DUB flight , this is fully loaded , gate backs off and then it sits there for 90 mins.. why ... BECAUSE IT'S RAINING !! and LHR is backed up.

Since then I have gone through AMS/FRA/CDG to go anywhere unless I really have to go to LHR.

I know the guys in SNN may disagree but the world does not start/end at LHR.

Mailman

Heathrow is at capacity as far as I can see.
I've stayed in Jury's Doyle hotel on a number of occassions which looks out on the approach path and I'd see planes flying in like clockwork every minute. I don't see how they could have any more planes flying in there as it is except late a night.
I spent time looking at this from my Hotel window as there is nothing to do in the area around heathrow and was amazed at how consistent the flow of planes in to Heathrow was. every slot is in use during the day.
More capacity is needed - simple as that.
Only way to get more people through Heathrow is to put larger planes on the routes which is probably why Aer Lingus is looking to move from Shannon to Belfast.

lostexpectation

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.

probe

I am not out to knock any airport – I’m simply pointing out that in my experience CDG2 offers the smoothest connectivity at the lowest cost and has the best ground connections. There has been so much rubbish spewed out in the Irish media about how “vital” LHR is to Ireland – it seemed to me opportune as a frequent traveller to show that there are better alternatives for many journeys.

Schiphol has the same problem as Dublin – it is a single terminal airport forcing hundreds of thousands of passengers into the same space. The benefit of having multiple directly connected terminals like CDG and BCN is that you have shorter walks to the gate, less crowd chaos in arrivals, departures and in the airside. Emergency situations can be more safely isolated to one terminal – allowing the show to be kept running during bomb alerts, fires, etc.

Many flights to/from Schiphol in my experience run late – particularly at peak times of the day. One of the reasons for this is that it is stuck in the middle of the busiest portion of European air traffic corridors. Travelling from Schiphol to Ireland you also have to fly over the congested airspace of Southern England which can add further delay.

If you visit the klm.ie website and try to reserve via AMS using the basket of long haul flights on the list, chances are the KLM website will send you via AF and CDG for many of the routes!

Aside from the Netherlands, Schiphol airport has poor direct rail connectivity to the rest of Europe. Schiphol Airport to Brussels by train takes 2h30 to 4h18. CDG to Brussels is about 75 mins. Good fast rail connectivity is important – a TGV produces 40g of CO2 per PAX/km – compared with about 100g+ in an efficient aircraft or 150 to 300g/km in a typical car.

Paris has a far greater choice of destinations and frequency of flights – and while KLM is now part of Air France, they haven’t quite got the KLM in flight service up to AF standards.

Paris airports timetable (103 pages): http://www.aeroportsdeparis.fr/Adp/Resources/ed64cead-8b70-4026-bf51-731bf75cda23-guidehorairesjuin2007.pdf

Schiphol airline timetable (33 pages): http://www.schiphol.nl/media/portal/_inchecken_bagage/pdf/pdf_files/passenger_v1_m56577569830815256.pdf

Schiphol rail connections timetable (98 pages): http://der.probe.googlepages.com/schiphol.pdf

.probe

probe

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.

.probe

Prof_V

probe wrote:

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.

True, but the demand increase resulting from the additional capacity would be likely to more than cancel out the advantages of decongestion (a road problem too, of course). The most sensible thing to do might be to combine demand restraint with selective capacity provision, but, politically, people tend to be either/or (and of course there are environmental arguments, particularly at places like LHR, that wouldn't be addressed by decongesting the airport).

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.
.probe

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.

probe

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.

.probe

Prof_V

probe wrote:

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

That's reasonable, but people seem to want either pricing or capacity, not a combination. (Also, keeping growth to the environment-neutral amount might make for serious underuse of the new assets).

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 :-)

Water vapour is one of the reasons why aviation emissions have a bigger impact per unit of carbon dioxide that ground-level emissions. Aircraft actually make a significant difference to cirrus cloud formation, and cirrus clouds have a particularly big heat-trapping impact. Switch to hydrogen and you treble water emissions; however, some people claim clouds will be less likely to form around hydrogen contrails because, essentially, they don't have dirt in them, but there are counter-claims on this subject too.

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.

Fair enough. However, it's also been argued that, because hydrogen planes will weigh less and have higher drag (that belly), the optimal cruise altitude will be higher, which would work against short-haul use.

dowlingm

Points to note here:

Heathrow is more likely to have more flights to destinations Irish people want to go to, as opposed to French colonial possessions etc. It's great to have CDG if you're going to Central Africa or principal US destinations where AF flies but for America, Canada, Australia I don't think there's a comparison.

LHR also has lots of Origin-Destination traffic which helps pay the bills because connecting traffic only pays a lesser amount per seat - the longhaul operator gets far more of the combined ticket price. There's some to CDG/AMS/FRA but not enough to run multiple services per day as there is to LHR.

Interestingly though, Air Canada are talking about reducing their LHR flights because of Brown's Air Passenger Duty so LHR might start losing some business to other hubs - maybe even DUB

fricatus

dowlingm wrote:

Heathrow is more likely to have more flights to destinations Irish people want to go to, as opposed to French colonial possessions etc. It's great to have CDG if you're going to Central Africa or principal US destinations where AF flies but for America, Canada, Australia I don't think there's a comparison.

Why go through LHR for American destinations at all when you can connect via JFK (from DUB and SNN), with the bonus of pre-clearing immigration in Ireland?

It seems to me an insane idea to go to somewhere like Phoenix or Pittsburgh via LHR, when you could go via NYC or Chicago.

And even if you must go via London, Gatwick has a lot of long-haul flights, if I recall correctly.

As regards Australia, Dubai is nowadays being touted as a major hub for SE Asian and Australian destinations. Seems to me to be a nicer idea to have two medium-longish flights when going to Oz, rather than one short one and one humungously long one from London.*

(*Are there even direct flights from London to Australia? I always thought they were forced to make a refuelling stop in Bangkok, HK or Singapore)

bk

fricatus wrote:

Why go through LHR for American destinations at all when you can connect via JFK (from DUB and SNN), with the bonus of pre-clearing immigration in Ireland?

So you can have the pleasure of flying Virgin Atlantic.

For instance if you are heading to San Fran, it is much nicer to have a short flight to London and then a nice, comfortable direct flight that you can sleep on all the way to San Fran, rather then have it broken up in the middle by changing at JFK.

mikedragon32

bk wrote:

So you can have the pleasure of flying Virgin Atlantic.

For instance if you are heading to San Fran, it is much nicer to have a short flight to London and then a nice, comfortable direct flight that you can sleep on all the way to San Fran, rather then have it broken up in the middle by changing at JFK.

Can't you fly AL to SF direct now? Yeah, AL, I know...

dowlingm wrote:

...LHR might start losing some business to other hubs - maybe even DUB

The prospect of Dublin as a hub would horrify me. Not because of the increased traffic etc, merely because as an airport, it's a sh1thole and it's not really properly equipped for transit passengers.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

probe

dowlingm wrote:

Points to note here:

Heathrow is more likely to have more flights to destinations Irish people want to go to, as opposed to French colonial possessions etc.

Name a destination that you can't fly to from Paris that Irish people would wish to go to that you can from London?

As an aside, your so-called French colonial possessions are IN France and IN the EU, just as much as the Aran Islands or Donegal are in Ireland and the EU. Their natives are 100% French nationals and EU citizens. They vote in the French elections for the French parliament and president. They have French standards of health service, EdF supplies the electricity, France Telecom runs the phone system, they have French television, La Poste delivers the letters, they have French postcodes, pay French taxes, and the Euro is their currency like every other part of France.

If you want to see the sharp difference between colonialisation and being part of a country, take a trip to the ex Dutch colony of Suriname in South America. When it rains the streets in Suriname typically have 30cm of water and you have to wade your way along in boots. Basically a third world country. Travel 500 m across the border into French Guyana and you will find cars with EU number plates, as in Ireland or Austria, the drainage system works properly, the restaurants are as good as in any French town, proper roads, airports, everything you would expect to find in Europe. Just next to the Amazon jungle!

Far better standards than you will have to put up with at Heathrow Airport!

Don't just take my word for it - any honest patriotic Englishman will tell you the same thing. eg as David Learmont of Flight International told RTE today:

"He highlighted that the rest of the world is shunning Heathrow because it is 'congested and unreliable' in favour of interchanges at Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt."

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0817/aerlingus.html

Unfortunately Aer Lingus has changed little since privatisation. They still sell the Stalinist hard class E-additive laden sandwiches on their inflight trolley service. And the same old plonk wine as before, but at Baron Philippe Rotschild Mouton Cadet prices! Nothing healthy to eat (unless you bring it on board with you). They still fly into the antiquated terminal 1 at Paris CDG (rather than T2-ABCDEF). - From T1 it takes an hour+ to change planes. Aer Lingus stuff as many PAX as they can into LHR, and use backstreet baggage handling contractors to save the company a few cents (both in London and Paris) - forgetting that the passenger has better things to do (eg catch their next flight or train) rather than waiting around a baggage claim area for 20 to 30 minutes for their bags.

Aer Lingus needs to do some serious thinking at the top of the organization - along the lines of who is paying their salaries and what their customers' precise requirements are.

.probe


Map of Guyana/Suriname:

http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=4.497024~-54.115906&style=r&lvl=8&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&encType=1

Victor

probe wrote:

Name a destination that you can't fly to from Paris that Irish people would wish to go to that you can from London?

"I think former colonial possessions" was meant, i.e. Francophone West Africa, etc.

dermo88

Nothing can describe the contempt I have for London Heathrow and all it represents. Its overbearing, beaureacratic, overpriced. It needs to be replaced, and a new Airport, built Hong Kong style out in the Thames Estuary is, in my eyes the only long term solution to the chaotic mess that is LHR.

LHR represents the last dregs of British 1970's style customer service and efficiency.

Sadly, the "war on terror" has made International travel a more unpleasant experience since 2001, and when we have International crossroads such as Heathrow, it is inevitable that there will be problems. Its the nature of the beast, and there is really no way around it.

probe

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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probe

For anyone worried about the choice of destinations available on Air France, check out this clickable map – only a tiny fraction of these are ex French colonies.

http://www.airfrance.us/US/en/local/transverse/frame/genericIFrame.htm?url=/US/en/local/guidevoyageur/reseau/planisphere_planisphere_ete.htm&contexteParticulier=d6

Speaking of former colonies, only two US airlines can fly to Heathrow (American and United).

United, US Airways, American, Continental, Delta, and Northwest all fly into CDG.

.probe

Yoda

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

Too true. It used to be an airline. A national airline.