Hello and welcome to the Independence Daily Travel podcast. It's Wednesday the 29th of January.

Heathrow being much discussed and in a week where we have seen, for example, just on Monday,

36 cancellations of flights because it was a bit windy. One Qatar Airways plane actually diverting to Amsterdam of all places,

there's clearly perhaps a need to do something. But what? I'm with Paul Charles, former communications

director for Virgin Atlantic. He's been kicking around in travel and tourism almost as long as I have.

So Paul, what's the answer?

Well, this has been a long-running saw, along with various other infrastructure projects in the UK,

where we've seen a political battlefield over the future of Heathrow.

And there are lots of options. Lots of people have looked into it,

like Howard Davis, former Governor of the Bank of England, who's looked into this and said,

you don't have to build a third runway from the outset. You could do what are called mixed mode

operations. That's where you have landings and takeoffs on the same runway. And at the moment, of course, the two runways at Heathrow are used separately, one for take-off

and one for landing. So it is possible to speed up growth at Heathrow in the short term without

the need for billions and billions of pounds to be spent on a third runway. But if this government

believes it can get it through, it would

be a major achievement. The challenge, of course, is it's likely to go to the courts as it has

done every time before. And that could see it kicks even further down the road. Sadly, yes.

It was basically 20 years ago that the last Labour government

said we've got to have a third runway at Heathrow and that got stuck in the long grass. Of course,

David Cameron famously with the coalition government commissioned Sir Howard Davis to do a report

on what London needed but carefully told him he couldn't report back

until after the next election.

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