Forum Topic

French scrap £8bn Charles de Gaulle airport expansion

No in depth news as I have to subscribe to read report.Any hope our government will do a u turn and do the same re-Heathrow ?

Paul Jennings ● 2083d10 Comments

I read this morning that Ministers were pushing hard for a third runway at Heathrow.  Idiots.

Claire Moran ● 2083d

CDG was always a fairly disorganised airport but it was very busy (76m passengers pre-Covid).  The additional terminal would have increased capacity by 35-40m passengers (about 50% capacity increase).CDG passenger numbers have grown 7 fold in the last 40 years whereas Heathrow has grown 2.5x In the hopefully soon post Covid world it may be the air travel reduces, which would have made the CDG expansion either wholly unnecessary or unnecessarily large in scale.  But the point is that until we get to that post Covid world and live in it for a few years we just do not know how popular air travel will be.But there are 2 key differences between CDG and Heathrow.  Heathrow has been operating a full capacity (80 m passengers) for some time, CDG in 2019 still had some spare capacity (about 4 million passengers worth).  Secondly, a much greater proportion of air travel from CDG looks as though it could be reached in a reasonable time frame by high speed rail than for Heathrow.Whilst it is perfectly legitimate to prioritise environment over air travel, the reality is that the French had far more options than the UK would.I doubt the UK govt will change their mind, the Heathrow saga has gone on far too long already and has massively contributed to the whole idea that the UK is now unable to undertake any major infrastructure projects (HS2 suggests that the perception is grounded in reality!).My very personal opinion, and with absolute no evidence to back it up(!), is that post Covid air travel will gradually return to the levels of 2019 but that it could easily take 5-10 years to do so.  If that happens then the UK needs more air passenger capacity. I also suspect that there will be improvements in aircraft design which will reduce emissions and noise issues.  My view is that we do need to build in more capacity even though there are some environmental concerns - it just means we need to work harder at reducing emissions from other parts of the economy

Justin Stephenson ● 2083d

So just a thought - with the UK out of the EU, does it really need to be the entry point for travel headed to the continent?

David Lesniak ● 2082d

Actually, the French government has called for the abandonment of the expansion precisely on environmental grounds. https://www.politico.eu/article/french-minister-roissy-charles-de-gaulle-airport-expansion-scrapped/The UK's Committee on Climate Change recently stated that "aviation is likely to be the largest emitting sector in the UK by 2050" and said "The Government should assess its airport capacity strategy in this context. Specifically, investments will need to be demonstrated to make economic sense in a net-zero world and the transition towards it."  https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Letter-from-Lord-Deben-to-Grant-Shapps-IAS.pdfUndoubtedly the UK needs more investment in its infrastructure, but that does not mean that every major infrastructure project has intrinsic merit. In fact once the carbon costs are included, Heathrow expansion represents a net loss to the UK, with a transfer of public benefit, in terms of lower emissions, to private profit.

Tom Pike ● 2082d

So Brexit could possibly make the difference between Heathrow expansion going ahead and not?If so (and if the difference is the expansion doesn’t go ahead) finally a first, or possibly second (depending what you think about the vaccination roll out) Brexit dividend to counter a portion of the bad outcomes so far.

Andrew Jones ● 2082d

France has an opportunity, which the far more densely populated England does not, to expand the TGV high speed network to replace domestic air travel and possibly extend to a reasonable amount of Europe: for example a direct high speed TGV route from Paris to Madrid would be about a 3-4 hour journey - definitely better by train.The problem which the French decision ignores is how to you deal with longer journeys, does air travel revert to what it was originally, the sole preserve of the rich.  How does that impact on places whose economy is heavily dependent on tourism from UK/EU/USA etc?I am not pretending I have the answers but I do know that making air travel decisions solely on environmental grounds is likely to cause as more problems than such a decision solves

Justin Stephenson ● 2082d

A lot to take on board when taking these decisions. Heathrow in my opinion is not the place for expansion. Pity Croydon didn't expand way back as less people would have been affected by the flight paths. Perhaps the only respite I may get is in new technology for aircraft. Thanks everyone for your inputs.

Paul Jennings ● 2082d

Why is Gatwick so unpopular with the planners? I like Gatwick.  I had a theory that the Horse Hill on-shore oil well (with gas flare) had made expansion of Gatwick too dangerous - literally dangerous if aircraft had to dump fuel before landing, but what are your thoughts?  This is a more and more interesting discussion! Thank you.

Una-Jane Winfield ● 2081d

I'm not sure that it will return to 2019 levels.  A lot of Heathrow usage is for business travel.  That will be much reduced in future, with many more online meetings.  That will be a lasting effect of the pandemic.Also, HS2 will remove some demand for flights to the North and to Scotland, assuming they price the tickets sensibly.  Virgin were operating 26 flights per day from Heathrow to Manchester, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen.  Add in BA and other airlines, and there are a lot of domestic flights out of Heathrow.With HS2, demand for those will be reduced, on top of the reduced demand for business travel.  That's especially true for Manchester.  From most of London, to get to Heathrow takes an hour or so.  Allowing time for check in and all the security stuff, it's going to be a lot quicker to get a train to Manchester than a plane in the future.

Al Webber ● 2081d

Indeed, my company spends millions every year on international business travel but Covid has been a massive wake up call and has called into question the absolute necessity of so much travel. The consensus is that when things ‘normalise’, our business  travel will never come close to what it has been over the last 20 years. Those days are over for this generation at least.

Steve Taylor ● 2080d