London, Heathrow Airport, Gatwick Airport and the British government have been deep in a controversy over airport expansion for nearly as long as it took Berlin to build its endlessly-delayed new airport, and a new round is about to start.
This time it's Gatwick's turn to stir the pot, with a revived plan to turn its emergency and standby runway into a second main runway to allow more flights and reduce delays. It's not a new plan, but it's been revived by the airport operators.
Under the plan, first offered in 2018, the second runway, now used mainly as a taxiway, would be widened enough so that its centerline would be 210 meters apart from the centerline of the main runway, the distance required when both runways are used by medium or heavy planes.
Although Gatwick's plans have come under some of the same environmental criticism as Heathrow's, a key point cited by Gatwick is that the expansion would be entirely within the existing boundaries of the airport and would not require any changes in flight paths. Larger, wide-bodied planes would use the existing runway, while most medium planes such as Ryanair's 737s and Easyjet's A320s would use the new lane.
A couple of years ago, the fight appeared to be over, with Heathrow the winner. In 2018, the government gave Heathrow the green light for its plan, which would cost billions and require acquiring large tracts of new land around the existing perimeter, over the objections of locals and London's mayor.
But progress on the plan was halted first by legal wrangling over environmental issues and then by the pandemic, the effects of which put both the financing and the need for a third runway on long-term hold. While Gatwick has suffered the biggest business drop of any top 40 airport in Europe, it believes it's in a good position to grow by the time the world would be completed in perhaps two years. It also cites a cost of about £500,000 pounds, a fraction of the Heathrow plan.
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