Expansion Plans for Heathrow Airport Are Grounded for Now
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Pity the poor schoolchildren, at least when the jets scream overhead, which they do about once a minute. So Heathrow Airport will spend 1.8 million pounds, about $2.9 million, to build “super adobe” domes, designed for earthquake zones in Asia and Africa, at 21 British schools to protect children from the noise of the third busiest airport in the world. Four of the domes, consisting of plaster walls and coiled bags of earth, are already in use at the Hounslow Heath Infant and Nursery School, where airplanes coming in to land pass fewer than 200 yards overhead and in busy times, arrive or leave every 60 seconds, crisscrossing the sky. The domes look like hobbit homes, but the school’s head teacher, Kathryn Harper-Quinn, said they make it much easier for students to concentrate, especially for those whose first language is not English. “You need to listen to the teacher, but as you need to refocus each time after a plane flies over, you start losing energy,” she said. With the domes, said Caroline Macgill, another teacher, the school is able to hold twice as many outdoor classes and is seeing better results from students — 580 in total, ages 3 to 7. One 6-year-old, Rinal Kaur Gaba, said that the noise was sometimes so bad that “in the playground, when I want to speak to my friends, I can only talk to them in the adobe huts.” The domes, which cut the noise by 19 decibels, are just the latest example of the absurdities and complexities surrounding the long debate about the expansion of Heathrow, which desperately needs a third runway to meet increasing demand and to keep London competitive with other European hubs like Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam — or so says Heathrow Airport Holdings, the owner. But there is enormous resistance from the suburban boroughs that have been built up since the airport was first established in 1929 in the fields and orchards of the hamlet of Heathrow. It became a fully civilian airport just after the war, in 1946. The argument is over noise, to be sure, but also over safety, environmental damage, carbon footprints and the right of the government to seize the land that would be necessary for another runway. The borough of Hounslow, itself, not surprisingly, is opposed to a third runway, citing noise and environmental concerns in a specially produced brochure. Still, with so many residents working at Heathrow, no one here wants the airport to shut down. But doing nothing seems a poor option for a country trying to compete in a global marketplace. The fight over Heathrow has stymied successive governments. Yet another commission is scheduled to emerge by year’s end with an “interim report” ordered up by the current coalition government, which halted Heathrow expansion plans originally approved in 2010. The delays have been enormously frustrating, too, to major commercial players like British Airways, which uses Heathrow as a hub and is critical of the fees it charges; it also sees other airlines like Air France and Emirates expanding. Alternatives have been proposed, most recently by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who has suggested closing Heathrow, turning the site into another suburb for up to 300,000 houses (given the shortage of affordable housing in and around the capital) and building a large new airport with multiple runways on recovered land in the Thames estuary. Just last month, a consortium created by the mayor revealed further fancy design plans for a six-runway airport, which would bring aircraft over the estuary, rather than over heavily residential areas, and would be connected to London by new high-speed rail and highway improvements. The suggested location is in the middle of the Thames estuary, about 50 miles east of central London; not only could more aircraft land there, they could do so 24 hours a day. The designers claim that such a new airport could be built in seven years and handle 172 million passengers annually. Heathrow this year will handle about 71.6 million passengers, 31.8 percent of the passengers at all British airports. Gatwick, which is 30 miles south of London and wants a second runway, is about half as busy as Heathrow, followed by Manchester, Stansted and Luton. But there are significant problems involved in expanding any of the other airports close to London, and debate rages over whether competition among Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted might better serve passengers. While an estuary airport seems attractive, the problem is, as ever, money. The cost of this latest proposal is estimated at £47.4 billion, about $77.6 billion, but who knows what it might finally cost, counting new transport links, while an inland expansion of Heathrow has been held back by noise and politics. (Estimates for a third runway at Heathrow are £14 billion to £18 billion, or $22.9 billion to $29.5 billion.) Given the uncertainty, major airlines want to stay at Heathrow, including British Airways, its Oneworld alliance and its major rivals in the Star Alliance, which includes United and Lufthansa, and SkyTeam, which includes Delta Air Lines and Air France. The latest study is being carried out by the Airports Commission, which is also looking into expanding Gatwick to create a second hub airport. In a speech in October, the commission’s chairman, Howard Davies, an economist, supported the need for more runways in booming southeast England and suggested that both Gatwick and Heathrow should add a runway, citing the growth of low-cost, short-haul airlines over the past decade. If there is only one new runway to be had, Gatwick wants it. By the end of this year, the commission is supposed to give its recommendations for immediate improvements of existing infrastructure over the next five years, and by the summer of 2015 it is to deliver a final report about its longer-term recommendations — safely after the next general election. Other countries have managed better. In Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Europe’s second busiest, is hardly loved, but it has four runways now and an ever-expanding number of terminals; Frankfurt Airport, Europe’s third largest, also has four runways. Schiphol in Amsterdam has six. But even supposedly efficient Germany has managed to create an embarrassing circus of mishaps and delays around the creation of a new airport for Berlin. At the Hounslow Heath school, Ms. Harper-Quinn said that the idea for the hobbit huts followed a chance encounter with Julian Faulkner, a founder of Small Earth, who has built a village of similar huts in Nepal. At the school, even the children’s chickens have their own noise-reduction dome. One student, Hamze Ali, 6, said the airplanes annoyed him. “When you’re talking to somebody and an airplane comes, you forget what you were saying and the other person walks away,” he said. “It makes me confused and sad.” Mrs. Macgill, the teacher, agreed. “You start telling this fantastic story to your pupils and then you’ll have to stop for a few seconds for the noise to pass,” she said. Despite the opposition, it appears likely that a third runway for Heathrow will be built, everyone acknowledges, but it will not do much for the children and chickens of Hounslow Heath. <NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting. |