Every cloud has its silver lining

From the letters page of the Independent newspaper, Saturday 23 December 2006:

Sir: As part of the 51 per cent of the population who did not take a flight this year, I cannot help but find a beautiful irony in fog grounding hundreds of planes at Heathrow (“A sorry story that highlights the flaw in aviation policy”, 22 December).

How nice to see the climate wrecking flights for a change, rather than, as usually happens, flights wrecking the climate.

R. GEORGE, LONDON SW19

Just before Christmas we were treated the sights of hundreds of emotional travellers left stranded at London Heathrow, as thick fog stubbornly refused to shift from the two rather unsophisticated stretches of concrete that sandwich the central complex of terminals at the airport.

Television newsreaders and newspaper copy writers were excitedly describing it as ‘travel chaos’, or even with as ‘travel misery’. Airlines were already being marked down as ‘beleagured’ before the inclement weather had settled in – it has not been a good year for commercial aviation in Europe. The much vaunted double deck Airbus A380 – which was supposed to relieve so much congestion at hub airports such as Heathrow – has slipped behind schedule, and governments across Europe are finally waking up to the rather late realisation that it’s time to start taxing people who fly for the environmental damage that their flights are causing (although Gordon Brown’s extra £5 a flight is not going to be nearly enough).

In order to loosen some slack at the airport, British Airways cut all domestic routes in and out of Heathrow for the duration of the heavy fog. What astonished so many bystanders was the sheer number of domestic flights that we have flying in and out of Heathrow every day. For an island nation whose length can barely justify overnight sleeper trains, it was incredible that this meant one hundred and fifty fewer flights would be operating than on a normal day.

While it is getting more and more socially acceptable to harang someone over the dinner table for flying with Easyjet from London Stantsed to Newcastle (almost as acceptable, in fact, as haranging a smoker, in fact) the fog at Heathrow revealed a problem. The vast proportion of BA’s affected passengers who were trying to fly on domestic routes were those who had just arrived or who were trying to depart on international long-haul services. The low cost airlines may have sewn up Europe from your local airport, but for long haul BA is still one of the most competitive and popular airlines from throughout Great Britain. Their business strategy of not fighting with the lo-co airlines has paid off: BA is now doing very well off strong long haul business, and their European and domestic network is primarily a feeder into this.

And here’s the rub. Door to door, from the centre of London to the centre of Newcastle, the train still edges it, as it does between London and Manchester, Glasgow, Paris and Brussels. But our skies are still going to be clogged with this insane volume of domestic routes for as long as our airports and rail networks exist independently of one another, each operated by independent (and increasingly private) organisations. If we’re serious about cutting aeroplane emissions, we need a whole new level of joined up thinking.

Next time you find yourself at Amsterdam Schipol airport (one of the world’s finest international hubs) have a look in the basement of the landside terminal. It’s one of the biggest railway stations you’ve even seen in an airport. And there are trains to every corner of the Netherlands twenty four hours a day. London’s airports at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and City all boast about their integrated railway stations, but until airports are plugged into a national network of intercity railway routes that operate in and out of the airports before the first and after the last flights, we’re going to be playing a second rate game. And a dense cloud of fog could foul up everyones’ Christmas all over again.