"UK Airport Debate: Airports/ develop or be damned"

Sunday, June 22, 2003

Opinion
Airports/ develop or be damned/ British Airways' chief executive Rod
Eddington tells Graham Boynton why Britain must increase its flying
capacity
United Kingdom - The Sunday Telegraph


Rod Eddington knows exactly where air transportation in Britain should
go in the next decade. We have, he says, fallen behind our competitors.
The country needs to stop equivocating and develop an integrated
"world-class" transport infrastructure immediately, or all will be lost.

"The problem," says British Airways' chief executive, "is that in
Britain it takes forever to get permission to do anything, and virtually
anyone who objects can delay the decision indefinitely. We're already
playing catch up, not only with the newly industrialised countries in
Asia, but with the better-organised countries in Europe."

In practical terms, he claims, this means starting with an extra runway
at each of our main airports - Heathrow and Gatwick - and the
development of road and fast train links to these airports. He cites our
main European competitors as exemplars of this decisive and progressive
thinking.

"The French have been able to go ahead with expansion at Charles de
Gaulle and the extension of a high-speed rail link, the Dutch have been
able to go ahead with building additional infrastructure at Schiphol and
the Germans are in the process of building additional infrastructure,
including a high-speed rail link into Frankfurt."

Eddington's opinions are an important contribution to the debate on the
future development of Britain's airports, a national consultation
exercise being conducted by the Government. The consultation runs until
the end of this month and the Department for Transport (DfT) plans to
publish a White Paper at the end of the year that will set out policy
for the next 30 years.

Eddington's pro-development views are as voiciferous as those opposing
growth in air transport. The environment lobby claims that if forecasts
of airline passengers tripling to more than 500 million a year by 2030
are fulfilled, the attendant growth of flights and airports will bring
unacceptable environmental damage to the country as a whole and direct
misery to more than 600,000 people, who will be living under the
spreading flight paths.

Zac Goldsmith, the editor of The Ecologist magazine, says that the
predicted growth will increase aviation-related health-care costs
dramatically and will place dangerous strains on an already stressed
air-

traffic control system. He has called for taxes to be imposed on
aviation fuel and airline tickets - as well as a significant increase in
aircraft landing fees, which he believes "are artificially held down to
half the actual market level".

Goldsmith's position is supported by Peter Jay, the former economics
editor of the BBC, who says: "So long as the use of London's airports
costs travellers next to nothing, demand curves doubling every 20 years
can be drawn ad infinitum to bamboozle ministers and the public into
supposing, quite falsely, that extra capacity is needed."

Containment of the kind described by Jay and Goldsmith is not in
Eddington's vision and he sees the current debate as typical of the
vacillation that is preventing Britain from developing an integrated
transport infrastructure for the future. He believes our European
competitors are the ones who are most enjoying watching our seemingly
endless debates on how to go forward.

"World-class trading centres and countries have world-class
infrastructure. If you don't have world-class infrastructure, everybody
suffers. There is this view that you can have either good infrastructure
or a better quality of life and that if we stop people building roads
and railways and airports, somehow our lives will be better. But they
will not be.

"If you don't build world-class infrastructure, the quality of people's
lives deteriorates. They sit forever in traffic jams and in congested
airports. The trains don't work properly, the hospitals are full and the
education system collapses. If you don't build world-class
infrastructure, you don't improve the quality of people's lives - you
diminish it substantially."

These are not views arrived at in the white heat of the troubled
aviation industry of the past 12 months. In fact, soon after taking over
British Airways in 2001, Eddington delivered a stirring speech to the
Aviation Club, which set out his opinions unequivocally: "When I first
came to Britain [in the 1970s as a Rhodes scholar], some saw the
function of the civil service as, in the evocative phrase of the time,
to manage the process of decline. I never saw that as much of a mission
statement."

Compare this to attitudes in Hong Kong, where he had been working as
managing director of Cathay Pacific in the early 1990s and where
"precisely the opposite attitude prevailed".

"There was broad recognition in the community that to keep Hong Kong a
pre-eminent trading centre, certain things had to happen. One of them
was a new airport. They decided on a small, irregular-shaped island.
They sliced the top off it, built bridges above the sea and a tunnel
below it. As a result, Hong Kong doubled its airport capacity in five
years."

By contrast, he pointed out, there has been one major increase to
British airport capacity in 50 years. "In two generations there has been
one runway built - at Manchester airport. Demand for air travel in
Britain has nearly tripled since 1975 and Heathrow - our national
strategic asset - is operating with the same runway capacity now as
then."

As he told his audience that night, Heathrow is no longer Europe's
pre-eminent airport - Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam's Schiphol have all
overtaken it in recent years in terms of direct destinations served -
and in aviation "the process of decline has certainly been managed quite
effectively".

Since then Eddington has applied his progressive, expansionist thinking
to our national airline at a time when the five plagues of international
travel - the Concorde crash, foot and mouth, September 11, Sars and the
Iraq war - have threatened to bring down a number of major international
airlines.

He is also adamant that there is no case for increased taxation on the
airline industry. "I believe pounds 30 billion a year is spent in the UK
on subsidising transportation. Less than half a per cent comes to
aviation. In many countries airports are paid for and subsidised by the
government. Increased landing charges and parking levies from the
airlines are paying for the building of Terminal Five [at Heathrow]. As
for taxing jet fuel, we have always felt that emissions trading [a
system by which the most polluting airline pays the highest levy and the
most emission-efficient pays the least] is the way to go on jet fuel and
its environmental impact.

"If you look at the extent of subsidy that is poured into rail travel
here, you realise there is no case for aviation to answer."

And what happens if this consultation process drags on and decisions are
postponed?

"That's simple. Congestion gets worse, the quality of life deteriorates
and business goes elsewhere."


 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/dc/dcboard.php

*****************************************