Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 22nd of January and I'm at London Heath Row. We were talking about this yesterday because apparently the government is going to give the green light to a third runway here at London Heath Row. Also to say to Gatwick, yep, you can expand by bringing

your second standby runway into permanent use and also for good measure saying to Luton, yep,

if you want to nearly double your passenger numbers by 2041, that's fine too. And there's

quite a lot to pick up on from that. And, well,

let's start with the environmental response. I've just heard from George Mombio, the noted

environmentalist who is calling for a frequent flyer levy in order to reduce the demand for air travel

because he says that 70% of flighting about that,

then you will be able to reduce the demand for air travel

and therefore you won't need any more runways.

We've also had the EasyJet boss, Kenton Jarvis,

talking about what he would do at Heathrow. Now EasyJet has never flowed. The airline that does

is voiling and they have had a kind of intermittent activity here.

It's not really cut out for low-cost airlines simply because it's not a particularly efficient

place. You typically have to fly around in circles before you land. That burns fuel.

It's relatively slow to get going as well as anybody who's ever sat in a great long

queue of aircraft waiting to depart will know it's because well this is a very very constrained

airport the busiest two runway airport in the world and even if you've got a takeoff and a landing

every 80 seconds,

which is kind of what you need to do to keep things moving, that isn't enough.

As a well-known air traffic control expert told me,

you've got to have a nice little queue of planes waiting to take off

and a nice little queue of planes waiting to land and that means

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