Heathrow Airport Blog

£21.7 billion boost from Heathrow third runway

2010-03-05T13:57:09Z

If the third runway at Heathrow is eventually built, the financial benefit to the UK economy will be enormous. According to the BCC (British Chambers of Commerce), it would provide a boost of £21.7 billion to the economy through increasing the number of flights per day by 400.

The runway was just one of 13 transport projects that the BCC analysed. Altogether, these 13 projects would provide a boost of £85 billion to the UK economy. Heathrow, however, stood out as the project that provided by far the biggest individual financial benefit.

The BCC was concerned about looming spending cuts, and said that spending must not be cut on these important infrastructure projects. This comes despite both the present government and the Conservatives stating that they are going to have to make major public-spending cuts after the election.

The BCC worked out that the total costs for all of the projects came in at £29.8 billion. Although a large figure, this pales in comparison to the total benefit that the transport projects would bring to the economy in the long term. The money to fund the projects would be raised from the public sector and the private sector, with the public sector paying £3.2 billion per year for five years and the remaining £14.3 billion coming from the private sector.

The director general of the BCC, David Frost, said that cuts in transport infrastructure “must not become a politically convenient way to slash spending after an election”, adding that there are much bigger savings that can be made from larger budgets such as education and health.

Full body scanners may be illegal

2010-02-26T14:49:28Z

The EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) has raised serious concerns about the legality of the government’s decision to install full-body scanners at UK airports.

The machines, which use microwave technology to ‘see through’ clothing, have already been introduced at London Heathrow and Manchester airports. The machines are capable of revealing explosive material that would not set off metal detectors and cannot be found using physical body searches.

The chair of the commission, Trevor Philips, said in a letter to the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis that the EHRC ‘has serious doubts that the decision [...] complies with the law’. The commission is concerned that the absence of safeguards mean that the authorities are unable to check if passengers are being discriminated against on the basis of their race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation or disability.

A spokesperson for the Department of Transport said that the safety of the travelling public was the highest priority and would not be compromised. The Department was committed to ensuring that the security measures are legal, proportionate and non-discriminatory. Passengers would be chosen at random and not on the basis of personal characteristics.

The Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman, Chris Huhne, expressed concern that the Government was pressing ahead with the use of the scanners without addressing privacy concerns and safeguard issues.

Mr Philips acknowledged that full-body scanning and other security measures are undertaken for good reasons. He conceded that the Christmas Day incident over Detroit where explosives were concealed in undergarments meant stepping-up security levels. However, the concern of the EHRC was that national security policies would destroy the very liberties that they were designed to protect.

BA third-quarter loss smaller than expected

2010-02-12T15:49:47Z

British Airways has announced a pre-tax loss of £50 million in the three months to December 2009. Despite yet another quarter of loss making, it was a much smaller loss than had been expected, and as such has led many to predict the start of the recovery process of the embattled airline.

The loss that had been expected was £120 million, quite a different figure to that which BA revealed. The figure of £50 million also compares favourably to the £122 million loss that was announced for the same period in 2008.

On top of that, the quarter saw BA’s first operating profit in 15 months. The company made an operating profit of £25 million, which again led to speculation that the worst was over for the airline. However, this was in itself a small figure compared to the £178 million operating profit it made for the same period in 2007.

All hopes that BA is on the road to recovery also have to consider the fact that, despite the good results for the third quarter, in the nine months to December its pre-tax loss was £342 million, compared to £70 million in 2008.

It is still good news for BA, which is having a hard time at the moment as it desperately tries to avert strike action by the Unite union. This lower loss could help that process. Even so, however, BA also has a pension deficit of nearly £4 billion to deal with, so it is not quite out of the water yet.

Campaigners plan ‘last stand’ fortress

2010-02-05T14:30:43Z

Facing defeat at the hands of the Government and the British Airports Authority (BAA), famous campaign group, Greenpeace, is to construct an impregnable 'fortress' in the village of Sipson, near Heathrow Airport.

According to critics, the construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport would result in the destruction of between 700 and 4000 residential buildings, a community graveyard, and every brick in Sipson. The BAA has offered to buy all these properties but not everybody is keen on moving.

Greenpeace owns a single acre of land in the Sipson area, which it plans to use as the focus of its resistance against the BAA’s bulldozers. Over the next few months, some of the UK’s most pre-eminent architects will be commissioned to design a medieval fortress that will fit inside the Sipson acre.

The winning design will provide campaigners with a tangible blockade against the BAA’s bulldozers and the legions of police officers that are expected to descend on the area should the proposal ever get the green light. Greenpeace hopes to fill the castle with ordinary Britons, rather than vehement activists.

“Whoever wins the next election, they will come under enormous pressure from the aviation industry to push ahead with a third runway”, Greenpeace director, John Sauven, explained. “But if the bulldozers roll they will face a fortress occupied by people who oppose the expansion.”

The Sipson acre is currently owned by more than 60,000 different people across the globe – all of whom would have to be consulted if the BAA wanted to buy the plot of land. The term “legal headache” has never been more apposite.

Easter strike averted

2010-01-29T15:39:26Z

Unite has spared British Airways (BA) the ignominy of flight cancellations over the 2010 Easter weekend. The union expressed a desire to see “families travel in confidence,” but made no promises about future industrial action.

It is not the first strike to have bothered BA and Heathrow. During December, a High Court judge ruled that industrial action by the airline’s cabin crew was illegal, as the ballot included votes from people who had taken voluntary redundancy.

Up to 12,000 stewards could have graced the picket lines over the Christmas holiday, enough to ground BA’s entire fleet.

An Easter strike would have been detrimental to BA’s efforts to climb out of insolvency. Last year, BA asked staff members to work without pay in a bid to secure the future of the airline, but money remains tight.

Unite, which is one of the largest unions in the UK, has announced a fresh ballot for the weeks between the 25th of January and the 22nd February. If successful, BA stewards could strike from the 4th March 2010.

BA has refused to roll over, however. A spokesperson for the firm has warned that severe cutbacks will be the only consequence of industrial action, affecting staff travel benefits and the standard of company hotels.

The airline has also frozen pay rates for the next two years, and is encouraging other staff members to retrain as stewards. BA has come to view the strikes as a direct attack on its livelihood.

Crew members are concerned that BA has been reckless with its cost cutting measures, changing contracts on a whim and making too many people redundant.

Heathrow unveils ‘strip-search’ scanner

2010-01-07T14:09:48Z

Gordon Brown is to force the installation of full-body scanners at London Heathrow Airport, despite claims that the machines would not have been able to detect the substance carried by the Christmas Day bomber, who had sewn explosives into his underpants.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man who tried to blow up a transatlantic fight on December 25th 2009, is one of a number of aeroplane bombers who have precipitated an increase in security measures over the past few years.

The United States is now dangerously close to using passenger profiling to catch extremists, a screening process that is particularly harsh on people from Cuba, Iran, Syria and eleven other countries, so selected for their alleged sponsorship of Islamic ‘terror.’

Despite looking a whole lot like selective racism, US officials claim that profiling has become an unavoidable aspect of the modern world. A host of other countries, including Germany, France, Pakistan and Holland, have also upgraded security at major airports.

In the UK, the use of full-body scanners has been cleared by the government, and installation is expected to begin within the next three weeks. Costing £80,000 each, the machines will allow security teams to peek under passenger’s clothes without having to resort to the fabled strip-search.

Critics are terrified – not only are the machines incapable of catching certain kinds of explosive, but the images produced by full-body scanners contravene UK child pornography laws. They are called ‘naked scanners’ for a good reason.

The government is drafting a code of conduct for the scanners, which should stop inappropriate images being leaked out of UK airports, and into the vast gulf of the internet.