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Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, which comes to you from the Gatwick Bureau of the Independent, also known as the Beehive, the Wetherspoons Pub, actually.

Very friendly, very nice, great view of the concourse.

And also a good place to meet the chief executive of Gatwick Airport, Stuart Wingate.

Stuart, I've come to talk to you because

Gatwick, unbelievably, is going to get the next runway in southeast England. We always thought it was

going to be Heathrow. Of course, nothing confirmed yet, but tell me what your cunning plan is, please.

Well, for a number of years now simon we've been developing

a plan to bring into routine use our existing northern runway sometimes referred to as the

standby runway so this is a runway that in normal operations at the airport at least today it's

been used as a taxiway and what we propose to do is to actually bring that into routine use

and use it just for takeoffs have all of the landings on our current main runway and if we do that

then we can see the airport grow in future years to have passenger volumes in the late 2030s of about

78 million passengers so that would be almost twice as many as there are now.

A lot of people are going to be thinking, hang on,

you've got two runways already.

Why not just start using them now,

...