Friday, January 18, 2008

Is Heatrow in the wrong place?

This article points out the dangers of an airport in densely populated area:
BBC NEWS | UK | Will a third runway add to the risk?

What the article conveniently forgets, is that as I've been saying before, Heathrow in badly situated.

The dominants winds in Europe tend to be Westerly, and with LHR directly on the West boundaries of London, flight paths are directly over the city -probably a unique sad fact in Europe?

This means that over 2 millions of poor souls live (and try to sleep) under the flight path. Very scenic, but isn't that an un-necessary risk? We're told that given the improvement on reliability, 2 engines are enough for long flights over large bodies of water. Preliminary reports after yesterday's accident point to a failure from both engines about 90 seconds before crash-landing, I guess around above Richmond. For myself, I prefer 4 engines 4 long haul as in the Virgin ad...

Bottom line: if the Government wasn't in bed with BAA (and BA), it would develop the other 3 airports which are using flight path over less densely populated areas -namely Stanstead, Luton and Gatwick.

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1 comment:

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