Given that a new airport should have been built at Maplin back in the 70s but wasn't there seems to be little choice but to shoehorn more and more in at Heathrow.
I disagree…
Although the decision has obviously been made already (BAA wouldn’t have invested billions in T5 without assurance that the airport would stay at Heathrow), the obvious decision should be to start anew in the Thames Estuary. They could build a state-of-the-art airport with high speed rail links to the continent and all over the UK.
This new bit will cost billions and the environmental impact both in noise and pollution will be incredible…
They could do but seeing as they didn't 30 odd years ago are they any more likely now?
Also I believe that technological improvements will mean that noise and pollution will diminish in the future.
That’s what they want you to believe Uncle… but is there any evidence of it?
Aircraft have improved an incredible amount but as one that stays in Windsor when I come over to the UK I can tell you that the very latest, quietest, most efficient and high-tech aircraft out of the factory make
a fucking great noise when they lumber over your house at 6am en route to Runway 27L at Heathrow. The whole house shakes!
At least at the moment they switch runways so that most days you have a break from it for half-a-day…
The new runway will be ‘mixed-mode’ which means that you get the noise all day, every single day of your life…
And quite frankly, even with a move to more modern twin-engine aircraft you can’t have a Rolls-Royce Trent on each wing producing in excess of 76,000lb of thrust that isn’t going to produce a little noise and pollution…