Make Luton Airport great again. That is the call from the Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander,

who has today decided that the airport can almost double in the number of passengers it handles.

Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 3rd of April.

And yes, the big news is that forget Heathrow's expansion with a new runway or Gatwick's.

Luton Airport is nearly going to double in passenger numbers by the year 2040, by some expansion of the terminal buildings, building some new taxiways and

generally improving the infrastructure. This has been decided by the Transport Secretary, Heidi

Alexander, despite strong objections on all manner, as you can imagine, of environmental grounds.

But let's just take a step back and have a look at Luton Airport.

It's always been the poor relation of the London airports.

Way behind London Heathrow and Gatwick.

In the 1970s, it was scorned as the place where you kind of had to go to catch a charter flight,

but nobody would really want to do that. Things improved in the 90s when EasyJet decided it was

going to put its headquarters at Luton Airport and start launching no-frills flights from there.

But pretty quickly, Gatwick eclipsed Luton in the EasyJet timetable.

EasyJet is still there, but it doesn't get the same numbers of passengers.

But it has done pretty well considering because Wizzair, the Eastern European, No Frills

Airline, they make Luton their biggest headquarters.

This week Jet 2 started. Ryanair is there as well with quite a substantial base, although

nothing like as big as Stansted, which these days is the third biggest airport in the London area.

What will this expansion mean? Well, it's going to be,

as you can imagine, pretty slow if it's going to take 15 years almost to double. Their work will,

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