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

It's Monday the 24th of February at the start of a busy week for airports in the London area.

On Wednesday this week, Heathrow will be releasing some financial numbers

and at the same time it is likely to tell us more about its plans for expanding by building a third runway.

Meanwhile, there's an awful lot going on at Gatwick Airport in Sussex as well, the world's busiest single runway airport.

They very much want to become a two runway airport. To find out more about this,

I've been speaking to the chief executive, Stuart Wingate. Today we already have the northern

runway. It's routinely used at the moment as a taxiway in normal operations, but we do use it

as a runway, particularly if we're maintaining

the main runway that we have here at Gatwick. For us to bring it into routine use and meet

all of the established safety requirements, which are global standards, then we do need to move the

centre line of the northern runway 12 metres to the north, so just 12 meters. And we'll do that by adding a strip of additional runway Ashfeld to the north of the runway,

enabling us to move the centre line 12 meters to create a separation between the main runway center line

and the Northern runway center line of 210 meters.

So that's the proposal that we put forward several years ago now,

and that's the fundamental proposal that has been considered by the planning inspectors,

and that's what allows us to use the two runways together. So in the future, around the turn of the decade,

what we'd anticipate is to have all of the planes that landed Gatwick land on the existing main runway

and to have the take-offs split between the existing main runway and the northern runway.

Southeast England desperately needs another runway, at least according to how the market is

behaving, but what about environmental considerations for both local communities and more

widely for people who simply think there's too much flying already?

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