Heathrow, Hong Kong and the case for bigger planes

What London should do about its airports has not figured much in the UK election campaign so far. That is no surprise: the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are all riven on the issue, particularly over whether Heathrow should have a third runway.

Meanwhile Hong Kong, which as long ago as 1998 opened a new airport on an island away from the city centre, is about to run out of space.

Dead set on holding on to its status as Asia's premier business hub, Hong Kong's governors had no doubt what to do: last month its executive council approved a third Hong Kong runway.

UK business lobbyists and airlines can only despair. While Britain debates, others act.

For Boris Johnson, London's mayor, Conservative parliamentary candidate and pretender to the Tory leadership, it is worse than this.

A fierce opponent of a third Heathrow runway, Mr Johnson has long championed a Hong Kong solution: a new airport in the Thames Estuary. Just as Hong Kong realised it could not continue with its cramped Kai Tak Airport, where landing passengers could see into people's apartments, Mr Johnson argues Heathrow's position in densely populated west London makes expansion there impossible.

On a visit to Hong Kong in 2013, Mr Johnson pushed his claim for a London airport on what has been dubbed "Boris Island", saying: "Ambitious cities such as Hong Kong have stolen a march on us."

The most galling part is that the UK companies and architects who should be planning a new London airport have been doing Hong Kong's work instead.

When Mr Johnson toured Hong Kong's airport he heard about the UK firms that built it: Mott MacDonald and Arup engineers, and Foster+Partners architects, the would-be designers of a Thames Estuary airport.

Hong Kong's new runway is not without its critics. At HK$141.5bn, it is expensive. Hong Kong also has a construction worker shortage.

Still, the former colony is going ahead while the UK dithers. The outgoing Conservative-Liberal coalition appointed the Davies Commission to tell it what to do about London's airports, but only after the election.

The commission has already, unwisely in my view, dismissed Mr Johnson's airport. It will probably recommend a third Heathrow runway or a second at Gatwick. While I believe the next government should accept the recommendation and get on with it, I realise that the expected indecisive election outcome makes that unlikely.

Is there anything UK politicians can unite around in the meantime? I think there is: a move to bigger aircraft.

I was struck by Hong Kong's account of why its two runways had run out of space. The planners had assumed that the vast majority of aircraft would be large, with an average of 300 people on board. Instead, airlines have used smaller narrow-bodied planes with an average of 190 passengers on each.

This is part of a worldwide move towards point-to-point flights, rather than connecting passengers feeding into large aircraft at hub airports. This is why the giant Airbus A380 has struggled to find customers.

Hong Kong says it is consumer choice. Yes. But flying has a huge impact on pollution, noise levels and neighbourhoods. Governments can influence how people fly.

For a city such as London, with huge visitor numbers and constrained airport capacity, bigger planes are environmentally preferable, particularly with the old Boeing 747s reaching the end of their lives and the availability of quieter replacements such as the A380, extensively used at Dubai airport by Emirates.

The Liberal Democrats went into the 2010 election pledging to replace the UK's air duty, which is imposed on each departing passenger, with a tax on each aircraft instead. Labour has discussed it too. In coalition, the Conservatives initially agreed, before saying a per-plane tax appeared to be against international law.

The Lib-Dems talked about a tax that would increase with the weight of the aircraft and the distance flown.

Why not a flat per-plane tax? That would encourage airlines to fly with larger, fuller aircraft and to prioritise long over short journeys, encouraging more people to travel by rail on those.

As a House of Commons Librarynote said, it was not clear what law a per-plane tax contravened. It is worth looking into. If Britain is no longer an airports pioneer it can at least lead the way to more sustainable flying.

[email protected]: @Skapinker

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