Harrabin’s Little Bubble
March 1, 2020
By Paul Homewood
h/t It doesn’t add up…
What a strange little bubble Roger Harrabin lives in!
https://twitter.com/RHarrabin/status/1233286115425165312
Does he not realise that UK airlines is not a base for long haul international flights by UK airlines?
Of course, this is the problem with tax payer funded idiots like Harrabin – they don’t have the slightest idea how business works in the real world.
The world that pays his salary and taxes to the state which fund all of the programmes the BBC is so keen on.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
i think you need to redo your first line – it doesn’t make sense
mjr
I thought it was just me!
Some one third of passengers coming into Heathrow are merely in transit. They bring no benefit to the UK at all but just add to pollution. Why should we want to encourage more-the plan is that those numbers will double
Stansted and Gatwick are the obvious choices for significant expansion as hubs, should those be thought of as worthwhile, whilst regional airports would prevent the need for passengers to drive hundreds of miles.
Mind you, the expansion plans for Bristol airport have just been turned down.
Have you talked with all those other airlines that would. Your though process is too narrow.
The Hat Tip is from one of our readers, “It does not add up”!
my comment was that “.. uk airlines is not …………. for uk airlines.. ” does not make any sense. Is this supposed to be saying that “Schipol is not a base for uk airlines” – that does make sense (and obviously affects UKairline revenue)
Yes seems it should be
“Does Harrabin not realise that Schipol is not a base for long haul international flights by UK airlines? “
Apart from the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand that if Heathrow loses out because part of their business transfers to Schipol or other European hubs, then the UK loses out, why would a radical green environmentalist like Harrabin be advocating flying at all.
What’s that you say – oh, yes, he does love travelling the world so that he can preach to us live from each environmental catastrophe so that we don’t have to experience the horror of it first hand. What a saint!
Heathrow is already losing out to a combination of APD pushing up airfares (just wait until there is a fare element for carbon offset) and its lack of connectivity within the UK. Last time I looked it had just 10 UK destinations compared with almost 30 for Schiphol.
But why would Harrabin even think about flying from Bradford to China? He shouldn’t be flying anywhere if he is serious about saving the planet.
Ok Pancho, you beat me to it!!
Perhaps he should do a piece on how much less pollution there is now in Wuhan?
Garwick and Stansted run flights to and from many European destinations. If they could build extra runways and terminals then they could take more long haul flights and these would be chosen for ease of connection. Norwegian already does this at Gatwick by running flights from Europe and to America. It would be cheaper and less disruptive than building at Heathrow and digging up the M25.
Yep, Stansted was always the logical choice for expansion. You can fit 1 more runway at gatwick then its full. You can fit this extra small sized runway at heathrow at huge cost then thats full. Or, you can build 3 more runways at stansted at less than half the cost of building up heathrow.
great chance to fix the stupid expand heathrow decision and build 3 more runways at stansted with highspeed rail links to Ldn and the North and upgrade the A14 to M14 to bring passengers from north.
Could be a big winner if we can get 3 runways instead of 1 overpriced one.
Links to Gatwick are not very good either by road or rail. The Gatwick ‘express’ service from Victoria has to share the line with services that stop at Clapham Junction and East Croydon. Providing a by-pass to this is nigh on impossible for Clapham but has been proposed for Croydon by adding extra platforms. Croydon is one of the busiest stations in the country.
I have a nice little chart based on 2015 CAA data that shows the origins and destinations of passengers through the main London airports. It is quite evident that each airport has a local catchment. Custom for Luton and Stansted is dominated by the East of England and London. For Gatwick, Surrey, Sussex Hampshire and Kent (with a contribution from East of England – there is a direct rail link to Bedford) provide the bulk of its non-London custom, while for Heathrow the spread is more even, reflecting its dominance on long haul routes, but it plainly pulls in the bulk of the customers from Berkshire, Bucks and Oxfordshire, as well as the SW and Wales. Luton and Gatwick have the lowest proportion of London based passengers, while inevitably City caters mainly to Londoners. Heathrow and Stansted have over 50% London based traffic. Traffic from anywhere North of the Midlands is tiny. That’s probably because there are better links to Schiphol already for long haul flyers.
Does he mean that expansion should be at (for example) Bradford rather than Heathrow?
At present all flights from UK to China require 1 stop whereas non-stop flights would reduce CO2 emissions.
“At present all flights from UK to China require 1 stop whereas non-stop flights would reduce CO2 emissions.”
Plenty of non stop flights to China from UK, apart from the current emergency but you can fly from Londons airports non stop to Beijing,Guangzhao , Shanghai, Wuhan, Xian and Qingdaio
I think the problem is we need more direct connections to other Chinese cities
Now there’s a piece on the BBC’s news website “Are these the first UK’s ‘climate refugees’ about the residents of Fairbourne on the west coast of Wales possibly having to move because of (supposedly) climate induced sea-level rise.
If you’ve ever been there it has perfectly good sea ans river defences, but you’d have to be a complete and utter nutter to want to live there as it’s a dump (apart from the miniature railway)
I know Fairbourne very well. It is a matter of cost benefit analysis. The place is very run down and housing cheap, with very few businesses-apart from the railway. The cost of defence-not a difficult proposition because they already have extensive defences and a lot of marshland and ‘flood plain’ -is deemed to be not worth it.
If the place had been more desirable and local prices higher then it would be deemed worth saving.
The rise in sea levels are very difficult to see and are perhaps of the order of a mm or so per year but arguably levels have been higher in the past
Long-term natural remodeling of the coastline through erosion and accretion has next to nothing to do with a couple of mm sea level rise a year.
The BBC is a past-master of blaming erosion and sinking land (although that is often from other activities of man – water/oil extraction/dredging/dams etc.) on climate change – it’s a pattern of deliberate dishonesty.
The main thing certain coastal communities in the UK are victims of is nature and politics.
A lot of these places would have already been lost to the sea if it wasn’t for the work of our ancestors building/maintaining defences etc. Also:-
“….the offshore dredging that is the basic cause of loss of coastline”
http://www.marinet.org.uk/the-demise-of-fairbourne.html
Last night CountryFile glossed over the mention of sudden sea level rise 8000 years ago as they looked at an old oak forest stump and preserved human footprints from c7.5k years ago exposed by the lowest tide.
@Crowcatcher That’s an old story ??
Ah Team Harra have reissued it today.
And the UK will lose out because tourism and investment will tend to follow point to point flights. If a Chinese firm from say Wuhan is thinking about investing in Europe, it will be more likely to invest at the end of a P2P flight.
I live near Newcastle in the north east, when I worked I travelled regularly to America and the Far East as well as Europe. I avoided Heathrow as much as possible, the ground handling facilities were always abysmal, tatty and overcrowded, I always travelled through Schipol, it was more civilised. Recently I went to USA via Heathrow,,terminal 5 is just full of shops not enough seats, nowhere to queue horrid, I also went via Schipol its better but it is now full of shops ,seats are upstairs if you know where to go, going the same way as Heathrow.
I think refusing the 3rd runway was correct but for the wrong reasons. The solution is to build a brand new no frills airport probably in the Thames estuary, as Boris once planned. China built 2 new airports in Beijing over the last 20 years, why cannot we do this?
I love the smell of aviation fuel. To me it smells like …..victory.
I think that a lot of posts miss the point. Heathrow (like Gatwick) is just one vast and expensive retail outlet – aeroplanes just happen to bring the customers. This is the reason its owners will fight tooth and nail to expand it.
Heathrow’s third runway is hard to defend, as many have pointed out the alternatives are viable and less likely to be stopped on environmental grounds. Personally I have little sympathy with residents complaining as they knew what they had on their doorstep before they moved to the area. The big issue here, as has been stated before, is the appeal decision will open the floodgates for challenges to every piece of infrastructure project we have in the pipeline and in the future and for this reason it has to be fought.
Yes, in the Thames is OK but much, much better, in the Humber estuary. Good transport links North, South and West.
I loath Heathrow having flown through it many times. Too many objections to list.
Don’t be daft the Humber Estuary is too windy and foggy, never mind the bird reserves.
Doncaster Airport is better.
Harrabin will be delighted that Warwick are to increase council tax by 30% to create a climate emergency fund. Of course this requires a referendum to go through but the council intend to force payment up front as the vote won’t be until May. If only people had the gumption to stand up and refuse to pay en masse until the vote result. How much money will they be wasting to find out that most snowflakes melt once their hard cash is threatened. Maybe the vote is a good thing as when – I assume not if – they get a stuffing it will be clear nobody supports the fake emergency.
Here’s another classic from the utterly clueless Harrabrain today.
Windfarms are the cheapest form of energy, so they need Government support!
Boris is a serious disappointment.
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