Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 21st of February. And here for you is another aviation leader. He is Thomas Volgbigh and he is the new chief executive of Heathrow Airport.

He told me today that the airport is now in profit for the first time since 2019,

and we've also been talking about the issues facing the airport,

everything from the possibility of a third runway to the fact that transit passengers

by the end of this year going through Heathrow will have to pay £10 and fill in an online

form even if they're only spending a couple of hours at the airport. First though, I asked him

how he was feeling.

I'm proud of the team. Although I wasn't along for the entire journey, I'm really proud of what

the team has achieved in 23. If you look at where we were just a year ago, just coming out

of the pandemic and all the work that has gone into rebuilding the airport, making it work again.

And I think we have created a really strong platform for further improvement,

particularly if you look at the metrics for the end of the year, on customer service, on punctuality,

on baggage and all our KBIs really are very close to or better than they were in 19.

You are warning very stridently in those results about the need for

tough decisions on investment. I wonder if you can spell out why that is and what that could mean.

Well, as you know, I mean, our charges are being reduced by regulation by 20% already were 1st of January.

And I mean, 20% is an enormous amount of money.

And we need to find out how can we be a successful company, both for our customers but also for our shareholders running at lower cost.

And that is looking at everything we do and see how can we do it smarter, more economically,

or stop doing things that are not critical.

Obviously, it's great to find smarter ways to do things, but cutting back on services,

I think that would alarm a lot of your nearly 80 million passengers, presumably

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