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

It's Tuesday the 21st of January.

And there are reports that the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as well as the Prime Minister,

Sarkir Stama, are very keen on approving expansion projects at three

of London's airports. They are Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton. And the idea is that you'll have

billions of pounds of private sector investment. The government might need to come up

with a bit of cash for local public transport. But basically, this is a very easy win for

increasing the amount of growth in the UK, which obviously Labor has made its flagship policy. So what's this all going to mean?

Well, I've been covering airport expansion since deep into the 20th century, and it was probably about 20 years ago that the then transport secretary Alistair Darling told me that doing nothing with airport capacity

in Southeast England was not an option. Since then, of course, exactly nothing has happened

except an awful lot of talk. At the moment, we have an incredibly efficient system.

It might not seem like it, but with no extra runways added since the Second World War,

we get an amazing amount of capacity out of the facilities.

And in particular, Heathrow, the busiest two runway airport in the world

landings and takeoffs every 80 seconds or so

and at gowick just around the m25 and down a bit

the busiest single runway airport in the world

has one plane landing and another one taking off every single. It doesn't work. Well, I'm afraid

it gets very messy and over Christmas and the new year. Bad weather caused hundreds of

cancellations affecting tens of thousands of passengers. We could see the same later this week,

predicted high winds. And so if you build more capacity, you should get more resilience.

Now, where exactly are we with airport expansion?

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