London’s Fourth Airport?

Boris Johnson has mooted a project to build, at vast expense, another hub airport on the Isle of Grain in Kent, which would serve London and the South east. It is a foolish plan and floated without proper thought and will almost certainly sink, like a stone in the sea.

There is a huge cost associated with building a new airport. The financial cost is estimated at eight billions but will almost certainly come in greater than that by a considerable margin. The expenditure is justified by claims that air travel will increase fourfold in the next twenty years; I am not sure how accurate those claims are. There are claims that without the new airport London will lose hub business to Paris, Frankfort and other European airports. If so, so be it.

There are serious environmental consequences of building a large new airport. The carbon dioxide emissions created in the building will be immense, quite apart from the carbon dioxide emissions given off by the additional aircraft.

Most importantly, the strongest objection to the estuary airport is that the proposed airport site is heavily populated with birds that live in the wetlands. Bird lovers will see that as an objection in itself but those using the airport might be unhappy to know that birds can bring down aircraft, when their bodies become entangled in the jets. This rarely happens but building an airport in the flight zone of millions of birds will increase that probability significantly. Aircraft are most vulnerable to bird strike when taking off, and a large bird ingested in the jet engine can not only cause serious damage to the engine but imperil the lives of those flying. There have been 200 lives lost, as far as we know, due to bird strike.

I cannot see that a cull of birds would be acceptable or would even prevent new birds taking up the place of the culled birds in time, so the problem is probably insoluble.

If we have eight billions to spend on aviation related matters then it would be more logical to spend it on aircraft design that would reduce the environmental impact of aircraft and which can use existing facilities. The money would be better used to design a craft that is larger than those used or in design, with more doors to load and offload people more quickly, that is much more fuel efficient and which can take off and land in shorter runways that those presently in use.

Air travel is no longer about being faster; it is about having a lower environmental impact. It is much more important to reduce the environmental impact of flying than it is to build more airports.