July 6th - Gatwick seeks to boost capacity
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
London Gatwick, the UK's second-busiest airport, has applied for permission to bring its standby runway into permanent use. Capacity could increase by 37% and be only one-fifth short of current Heathrow movement numbers. But environmental campaigners are outraged ...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:07.2 | It's quite late on on Thursday the 6th of July and that's because I've been waiting for an announcement. |
| 0:14.5 | And that announcement concerns Britain's second biggest airport. |
| 0:19.1 | That's London Gatwick and it has formally applied for a development |
| 0:25.2 | consent order, putting that into the planning inspectorate for permission to shift the current |
| 0:33.3 | standby runway 12 metres to the north. |
| 0:38.5 | Why would they be doing that? |
| 0:40.9 | Well, bluntly, because they think they can become a two runway airport on the cheap. |
| 0:48.7 | And they're probably right. |
| 0:51.2 | What they aim to do is really to extract more capacity from what is currently the busiest |
| 0:59.3 | single runway airport in the world. Now, they do amazing things. If you're a passenger at Gatwick, |
| 1:05.8 | it's really quite exciting. You're waiting there to take off. So get a seat on the left-hand side. |
| 1:12.0 | Normally, that's where the aircraft are coming in from from the east and you will see the lights of an aircraft coming in to |
| 1:19.3 | land and then the pilot of your plane will turn on to the runway and take off and as soon as she or he has got the aircraft off the ground, |
| 1:29.5 | well, then it's the time for term for another one to land and so on. They get extraordinary |
| 1:34.4 | capacity out of it, but there are limits. 281,000 movements in the year 2019. And the aim is effectively to have a second runway, |
| 1:50.3 | which will only be used for takeoffs, |
| 1:53.7 | but it will allow the airport to have more capacity |
| 1:58.4 | and crucially more resilience, |
| 2:00.6 | because you will be aware as i am that |
| 2:03.3 | whenever anything goes wrong at gatwick airport things start to unravel pretty quickly because there is |
| 2:09.7 | simply no capacity in the system same thing at heat row the busiest two runway airport in the world |
... |
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