Learning the lessons of the Internet
(This is additional material regarding the review of Britain's civil aviation needs and future plans, separate from the environmental and other such issues that I and others have covered in numerous places already.)
The whole idea of a so-called "hub airport".such as the variants that have over recent years been proposed for either the Hoo Peninsula or the Thames estuary is very attractive in many ways. Convenience is the single biggest factor here, appealing to regular and occasional travellers alike, if for slightly different reasons. Interconnection, rail and road links, and other factors make a well-planned hub convenient.
Especially bearing in mind the success of hub airports operating in some of our European neighbour states, it is hardly a surprise that we might feel a strong desire for a "piece of the action" and build a spanking new all-singing and all-dancing hub airport here in Britain. It is a model that has been shown to work really well in recent times.
However, it is really the best way to go? I think not, especially in the twenty-first century. That doesn't mean to say that we cannot increase and improve our air traffic capability and capacity, but that there is merit in taking a different approach, one that is perhaps more appropriate to the modern age.
The problems with a Hub
The main problems astart with the sheer cost, resulting in its being the only one of its kind, and the nature of such an airport making that even more the case. This ends up with an eggs-in-one-basket scenario, hugely dependent upon that facility being available without any serious interruptions. Inevitably this will not always be the case, and any significant incident that forces the closure of the hub airport for more than a day or two would have a dramatic impact on this country's standing within the global air travel industry.
Whether it be a natural matter such as severe weather, or a terrorist attack or critical threat (and a single target with that potential for so much disruption would automatically become a top target), one day it will happen. We all realise that.
The other main problem is sheer crowding of the skies. No matter how sophisticated modern stacking and other techniques might be, there is always going to be a physical limit to how many aeroplanes can be handled per day in practice. Unless air safety is compromised to some degree, that will remain unsurmountable.
A lesson to learn
The original DARPAnet, and then what it became – the Internet – was designed from the outset to have no single point of vulnerability. Everything was duplicated, triplicated or more and distributed around the network. That gave it the resilience we know today. Oh, you might have a hub in your home or office, but if that goes wonky you lose the lot. No-one else does, though, because they are outside your hub-based mini network.
That points the way to a solution to Britain's current air traffic dilemma, by having sufficient capacity at each of several locations to distribute the load and each of those locations able, at a pinch, to cope with overflows from another such airport. To some extent the latter is possible today; but where could the entire traffic from a suddenly-closed huge estuary (or similar) hub airport suddenly be feasibly and conveniently diverted?
Anyone with any sense of traffic flow and conscious of bottlenecks of various shapes (it's not exactly the same in the air as it is on the roads, for example) will be able to form a mental image of the hugely differing scenarios between an entire hub airport's traffic being diverted to smaller airports all around the country, and a more moderately sized chunk of air traffic being able to be diverted to nearby decent-sized alternative airports.
Thus, with airports such as Manston and Birmingham crying out for more traffic, and still possibilities with Gatwick and Stansted, there is scope with what we already have to make a much more cost-effective, less easily targeted (by the bad guys) and vastly more resilient structure than the Estuary/Grain/Cliffe hub concept could ever be.
They already have the feeder and support businesses in place, so there is no particular difficulty in coping with any reasonable expansion. I gather that Birmingham is ready and capable of doubling its traffic, for one example. The High Speed 2 (HS-2) rail link will be a great boon here, more for the link-ups it will provide than for the extra speed – though I am sensitive to the importance that so many in today's Britain attach to those saved minutes, especially cumulatively for regular travellers.
This is now the twenty-first century, and the old thinking – however successful it has been until now – will no longer suffice. It's the wrong way to think when looking ahead in the present age, and what I have outlined here is a far, far better approach.
It also has the merit of not dumping ground-level air traffic onto any community that doesn't already live with it, which at this stage would be inexcusable. Okay, when the new boom industry was first being set up, as with anything else that's new, society had to adapt; but this is now a mature industry. Any competent government should be able to avoid going back to those old ways.
Current indications are still that the "Boris island" (and variations) ideas are unlikely to be approved at the end of the current consultation; but it is still worthwhile to put forward alternatives during this exercise. I intend to put this post into the consultation, and am perfectly happy for any reader to use any or all of it either directly as as source material for their own contributions to that exercise.
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