When Terminal 5 opened at London’s Heathrow airport at a cost of 4.3 billion pounds (roughly $8 billion), it was supposed to be a state-of-the-art facility. Instead it was anything but that, with dozens of flight cancellations, enormous check-in lines and misplaced bags numbering in the thousands.
Is it time to shut the whole airport down? The London Times Online is reporting that London mayor Boris Johnson and his officials are drawing up plans to close Heathrow and open a 24-hour, four-runway airport on an artificial island in the Thames estuary.
The airport “would be connected to the high-speed Channel tunnel rail link to transport passengers into central London in about 35 minutes.” Officials think that the airport can be built in as little as six years with Heathrow being closed and the area turned into a residential and commercial development area.
Kit Malthouse, one of Johnson’s deputies and overseer of the Thames project says that the switch from Heathrow to the Thames airport wouldn’t happen overnight. It would be done in a three to four year period with those employees who worked at Heathrow being given the chance to move to the new airport.
While no monetary figure has been discussed to build the new airport, a similar island airport in Hong Kong, with two runways, cost 10 billion pounds.
Sources closed to Mayor Johnson say that Virgin Atlantic expressed interest in the Thames project, but the airline has denied it is prepared to provide any financial support. Instead, it wants a new runway to be built at Heathrow and considers that a top priority.
Zhang Mao, deputy mayor of Beijing, however, indicated he might consider investing in infrastructure projects in London, including venues for the 2012 Olympic Games. Johnson will talk to him when he visits the capital next month.
In the meantime, the government is expected to decide by the end of the year whether to allow a third runway at Heathrow to be built at a cost of 13 billion pounds. Internal Department for Transport documents, however, “show there is a ‘high risk’ that the [proposed third runway] would breach noise and air quality targets set by the European Union.”
