Ben Lowry: There is still - just - time to create a new hub airport in London and in Northern Ireland
The fire at Heathrow, and the disruption caused by a single day’s closure, has got me thinking about UK airport infrastructure again.
We can only hope that it was not terrorism. There is only so much we can as a society do to prevent such violence and disruption.
So we have to press ahead with developing our key infrastructure in both Northern Ireland and Britain, while making it as durable from attack as we can. This is easier in a new airport because you can design it with massive protections.
Heathrow has already been in the headlines due to the decision of the Labour Party government to back a third runway at the airport, which incidentally is an example of their hypocrisy. Just as that party harangued the Tory government for long overdue reforms to reduce the vast numbers of people in the UK now out of work on the grounds of health, so they harangued them for allegedly running roughshod over environmental protections – yet now, in office, they back one of the most environmentally controversial projects, expansion of Heathrow.
But the UK will need a mega airport hub for sure. It is just a question of whether or not it will continue to be at Heathrow. I continue to think that Heathrow should close and be replaced by a mega airport in the Thames estuary. This was one of Boris Johnson’s great ideas.
Heathrow would then become a technology and business hub (using all those existing terminal buildings) and the runway areas would be turned into luxury housing. You might say: ah but that will just benefit the rich. I would reply. no, because while it will produce beautiful housing for the very affluent it will also free up the over-priced housing, in handsome suburbs such as Ealing, vacated by the people who move into the new units.
The new airport would then operate 24 hours a day with multiple runways, and become perhaps the best airport in the world (Heathrow even in its current state is the fourth busiest on earth). It would have a spur link off the HS1 high speed line from London to Paris, that runs through Kent, so with fast access to both central London and France.
London Gatwick airport would then expand with a second runway, and Birmingham airport too, which is on the part of the HS2 high speed rail line that is being kept (the sections north of Birmingham have been scrapped). I then would advocate a plan that was ditched long ago – a fast rail link between the existing HS1 rail link and the newer, shortened HS2 link. That would then give Birmingham and beyond fast access to the new mega airport.
You might say: this is environmentally mad. We need to cut air travel. I would reply: good luck with that. The entire world wants to travel globally, just as we do.
The exact airport passenger numbers for last year have not been finalised yet, but they will confirm that almost every airport in the UK and Ireland has had its busiest year ever. If we try to stop people travelling, they won’t. It will just mean ever more crowded airports.
Which brings me to Northern Ireland and Dublin Airport.
I continue to think that Northern Ireland needs its own single hub airport at the location of Belfast International. This would involve the closure of both Belfast City (my preferred airport to use in NI) and City of Derry. It would then mean we could justify having dual carriageway spur roads from Aldergrove to both the M1 and M2 motorways, so that motorists driving to the new hub would not, as now, get caught behind tractors and lorries. The new single hub would also have enough passengers to justify a rail link.
And we would begin to attract some passengers back from the supremely successful Dublin Airport. This might sound petty, trying to ensure Belfast has an airport as big as Dublin. Not so – the latter caters to a far larger population, and will always be bigger. But it has a critical mass of passenger numbers and routes so that it gets ever more attractive to use, thus sucking in many passengers from north of the border.
I think we could have a smaller hub but one that begins to be used for transatlantic flights, even by people whose journey is not in fact originating in NI.
We are fast reaching a point where the closure of Heathrow for a replacement hub will become impossible. And there is no push at all for an NI hub airport. If neither idea comes to fruition the UK and NI will muddle on with the current arrangements. But I think that will be a major failure of imagination in a Britain that led the world in infrastructure and an Ulster that was the industrial powerhouse of Ireland.
• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor